a wood-burning stove, heat distribution was patchy and a jug of water had to be placed in the oven to rectify the problem.
The 22-cm sponge cakes never rose higher than three or four centimetres at the most and always split when removed from the pans. Or they imploded in the middle or they were lopsided. These imperfections were camouflaged by dollops of butter icing. Roped into kitchen duty from an early age, I became an expert butter-icing maker.
Each imperfect cake was welcomed with great enthusiasm and went down well with tea and compliments that it ‘tasted really good’ and ‘yes, I will have another slice, thanks’. Sweet was good, salt was good, fat was good – and you only live once. So there!
Stella’s speciality was coffee cake, made with an essence she guarded with her life. Her chocolate cake was light and fluffy, a genuine chocolatey melting moment. Mavie made fairy cakes, and little tarts with jam or coconut, and her Hertzoggies with a coconut meringue covering the jam. She also made crustless milk tart and tea loaves: banana, raisin, date or ginger.
For a few seasons, she did a roaring trade in rainbow-coloured, two-deck sponge cakes, selling to workers and their families at Strandfontein beach. But that market dried up when Ivan left his job as a beach control officer and became a Divisional Council traffic cop.
Saturday was baking day. We always had lots of visitors on Saturdays, many from Claremont plus the usual neighbourhood friends. People turned up uninvited, bringing prepared but uncooked exotic snacks, like doughnuts, koeksisters and samoosas that they would fry off at our place, or a pot of warm breyani.
Ivan’s speciality was watermelon or fig konfyt, and melon-and-ginger jam which he’d learnt to cook in his youth. Foodwise, he was the king of fry-ups. His version of ouvrou-onder-die-kombers consisted of leftover Sunday roast beef dipped in batter and fried.
He also made all kinds of smoortjies with onions, tomato, garlic polony, smoked snoek or bully beef. Unfortunately, all the frying caught up with him in the end quite suddenly at his desk at the old Regional Services Council building in Wale Street, Cape Town, in 1993. No amount of ballroom dancing and long-distance swimming from Kalk Bay to Muizenberg could offset a diet that bad.
Dor was the head gardener and chief baker. Before she became head flower arranger at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church on Lansdowne Road and was too busy on Saturday afternoons, Dor was usually the one who made the bread, scones and fruit pies, all prepared with careful consideration.
She would pick loquats or guavas and stew them, make the pastry, roll it out, place in Pyrex dishes, add the stewed fruit with whole cinnamon, arrange the pastry lattice on top, brush with egg and entrust it to the oven. The pies were served with a rich golden homemade custard. Fruit from the garden was also often stewed to go with oven-baked sago or tapioca pudding.
Dor also made bread-and-butter pudding and, for special occasions, Queen’s pudding. I’d crumble the white bread slices into a bowl. This she would place in a buttered stainless steel dish. She would scald milk and butter, pour it over the crumbs and let it stand for a few minutes before adding beaten egg yolk, sugar and vanilla essence. The mixture would be baked until set and then covered with jam. She’d beat the egg white until it formed peaks, add a tablespoon of sugar, mixed and spread over the jam. The dish was returned to the oven and baked until the meringue browned slightly. What a queen of a pudding!
In summer she made fruit salad with fruits from the garden plus pawpaw and bananas, which she bought. ‘The pawpaw is what makes the salad taste so great,’ she always said.
Stella made pineapple pudding, which consisted of a tin of Ideal milk, pineapple jelly and a tin of pineapple pieces, blitzed together and left to set in the fridge.
No, we did not have cake and pudding every day. These luxuries were for weekends. For the rest of the week, we had homemade left-over cake and coconut biscuits and store-bought Marie Biscuits and Ouma rusks. They were usually dipped in sweet, milky tea or coffee. The top of the movable, almost two-metre-long kitchen dresser was packed with great numbers of colourful old biscuit tins for the storage of cake and biscuits.
Real, cooked food was incidental in the grand scheme of things. ‘If we could eat pudding first, we would,’ Uncle Joey often quipped with his own brand of irreverence. And sometimes one or the other of them would indeed take a dip into the pudding bakkie first.
Mavie kept her cooking plain but flavourful with mixed herbs or thyme, bay leaves, salt and white pepper, nutmeg, cloves or cinnamon, depending on the dish. Everything had a smoky flavour from the woodstove and this gave the food a unique taste. That stove provided slow cooking at its best, although Mavie was not a fan of its erratic ways. She had great battles with it: slamming lids and letting off a litany of swear words quite often. The cleaning of all the movable parts was a sooty business and was cause for more f and b words.
Mavie’s most used recipes from the Salesians Boys’ School Recipe Book, 1960s.
The sisters were in their 20s and early 30s and they too wanted to be able to cook fast on an electric stove. But the electric cabling in the house was old and because of the uncertainty of the Group Areas removals, which were now in full swing, they did not want to go through the expense of re-cabling to a new electricity box.
Instead, Stella used the gas stove that she had for camping. Her favourite camping spot was Duikersklip before the Hangberg flats were built to the top of the dip, just before the rise of Hout Bay Sentinel. She, Meneer Wilfie and her friends would climb over to the rocky bay on the other side, which was very popular for kreef-diving. We went along for day trips but never stayed over.
Stella would also use the gas stove on countrywide road trips with her friends. She cooked only at weekends, after work on a Saturday. When she came back from her travels, she would cook dishes she had learned about. A peri-peri prawn dish with cashews and rice with saffron, after she’d been to Mozambique and Yorkshire pudding to go with the Sunday roast after she’d been to England.
Her travels also led to us receiving lots of holidaymakers: Indian Hindu and Tamil friends from Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Pinetown, and once some Portuguese people from Lourenco Marques who came to Cape Town to see if they wanted to stay here. They chose Rio de Janeiro instead after Mozambique gained independence in 1975 from Portugal, the colonial power that had governed the territory for five centuries. They got out before the civil war erupted.
Mavie cooked all the traditional meals that everyone was cooking at the time. For breakfast, Jungle Oats or mielie meal porridge – and Weetbix for those can’t-be-bothered days. For supper, she cooked all the bredies (green beans, tomato, cabbage), frikkadels, cabbage-wrapped frikkadels, liver in tomato sauce, sugar beans stew, Irish stew, mince-and-pea curry with white rice, spaghetti bolognaise and bobotie. Lunch was usually leftovers or a sandwich with tea.
For special occasions on weeknights, there was pot roast brisket (cheaper than lamb chops in the 60s and 70s), pot roast beef or pot roast chicken. Chicken was a luxury because it cost more than red meat. All were served with squash, cauliflower with white sauce, roast potatoes and yellow rice. Rustic soups enriched with soup bones full of marrow, vegetables and barley were winter highlights, followed by pumpkin fritters with sugar and cinnamon.
Climbing Table Mountain – Stella, Dor, Ivan and Mavie, 1950s.
One of the Lansdowne Anglican Churches picnics
