Recipes

All the excitement about national symbols has failed to provide South Africa with a national fish. Let me fill the gap by nominating hake. It is a wonderfully versatile fish with firm texture and mild, yet excellent flavour. Here’s a salute: a recipe of charm, heat and high colour.

There are so many favourites out there… chilli con carne, good ol’ steak, egg ’n chips, Durban mutton curry, braaiied boerewors and, one of the greateast of them all, spaghetti bolognaise. Here’s a take on this pasta classic that owes almost as much to the USA as it does to Italy.

There is little doubt that a good dessert gives a meal the neat conclusion it requires. Sadly, most desserts seem to be designed for the palates of children, with a massive overdose of cloying sweetness. Then along came crème caramel: not only a grown-up taste, but also a truly masterful addition to your culinary skills.

There’s more than one way to combine cream, mushrooms and rump steak. Give this major steak enhancement recipe your best shot. Your friends will love it.

‘Oh, give me a cup of that marvellous stuff’, goes the song. Without it nothing – not even this story – would get written on time …

This startling set of textures, flavours and aromas brings new meaning to that morning espresso. Sweet and crunchy baklava is more than a baked confection – it’s a subtle dessert too.

Pasta is a gift to the beginner cook. Here’s the faintly exotic input of Italian cuisine, married to the familiar and highly-desired flavours of eggs, bacon and leeks.

Agriculture, that most noble of the sciences, came to life in the Middle East. One of the first crops was chickpeas, which means that hummus has a long history. Here is a 21st century update of this magnificent food, made with tahini and a food processor.

It comes as a surprise that beer is a cooking medium. We all know about wine, even sherry. But a lager – how can this be true? Read on, dear reader, read on...

Would you believe it? It seems that butchers keep the trimmings from the beef fillets separate from the actual fillets. Much cheaper than whole fillet, they allow you to prepare a luxurious yet affordable casserole.

Here’s the king, or even the queen, of mango pickle recipes. There is no better way to add a powerful new dimension to the curry of your dreams…

For traditional human carnivores, a salad is good to look at but nothing to eat. To shatter this illusion, here is a salad to add goodness and taste to your next braai.

Why spend endless hours labouring on your Christmas dinner when you can get mouthwatering results with less effort? For the turkey, I’ve chosen a delicious recipe from my 85-year-old aunt in Brooklyn, New York.

You might like something a little less sweet for Christmas pudding. For that, try this mango pudding recipe.

Most traditional Christmas food assumes that we all live at the North Pole and need huge amounts of fat and salt to cope with frost bite and snow blindness. So instead of whole sucking pigs, turkeys and geese, here’s a local take on the national bird of Africa, and a homage to the mango, undoubtedly the most astonishing fruit that ever grew in the Garden of Eden.

Traditionally, in the cold northern hemisphere zones, Christmas puddings tend to be elaborate, doughy masses of flour and fruit, drowned in brandy and then set on fire.

Rolled pork belly is the regular presentation of this prize cut, but for this recipe you need to consult your butcher. Ask him to prepare an unrolled pork belly and to cut a pocket into the meat. This should ideally be nearly as wide and as deep as the belly as a whole.

A bunny from Durbs comes under the heading of extreme handheld food for two reasons. One is the size and the other is the veld-fire flavour of living chilli.

Hand-held food is how human eating began. In this recipe, we move beyond the caveman prototype to enclose delicious chunks of Chinese-influenced pork in a roll.

A pie? How can something so sweet be a pie? Where are the four-and-twenty blackbirds? Instead, here’s heaven in a dessert bowl. Sure tastes better than those blackbirds.