Praise-song for familiarity

"It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and what's happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it." Anthony Bourdain

A quarter of a century ago, when I was first asked to consider immigration to the United States, I remember saying: “ But I can’t eat the food there!” I recently returned to a South Africa where the food was both familiar, and reinvented. In a very good way.

Not to make anyone envious or anything (and full disclosure I hadn’t known this would happen, can’t really take credit for planning) but the wonderful aroma of wood fire and baking bread accompanied my dawn swims and beach walks every day of my brief sojourn in paradise. When did rural-ish South Africa discover sourdough on this scale? The lion lay down with the lamb. Wilderness had a baby with Culture and called it Artisan Bread.

And, no, for the squeamish or hygiene obsessed, I did not get sick from buying from this display of fresh baked loaves handled with no gloves in an open air kitchen on the beach, same as I didn’t get sick eating Ital food cooked right there by Rastafarians sans neoprene gloves on the beach in Negril, Jamaica.

I didn’t eat out much during this sojourn in South Africa. My happy little frangipani beach cottage came with the basic kitchen necessities, I enjoy pottering around with food prep and, though restaurant meals are ridiculously inexpensive and amazingly real and authentic, compared to the highly sugared, salted and overpriced frankenfood one is likely to encounter in the average American diner, I was on an extremely tight budget during this trip. My first outing, after getting my bearings in the cottage was to a grocery store a few blocks away to stock the kitchen shelves. Rice, cooking oil, tea, fruit juice, curry powder, butter and marmite (for that sourdough bread) fresh fruit and vegetables. Of course I read labels: I am fussy about what I call food. Every item I needed for my two week stay was mostly free of preservatives, colourings and unpronounceable chemicals and was Made in South Africa. Of course the fruit and vegetables were local too. No need for those little country of origin signs which are so ubiquitous in the fresh produce section of a US grocery store.

I did however enjoy a few meals out with the extended family, and on a couple of occasions with old friends. Though the food was excellent at all, my favorite setting might just have been Pizzarella. Look hard in the image above and you will see the tables of this open air, beachside, but sheltered from wind by native bush, restaurant.

In quiet times, the staff could be found raking the sand between the tables into beautiful zen swirls.

To compliment the zen serenity of the view of my (felt like) private swimming pool from the restaurant lookout.

It was at Pizzarella that I discovered a new and highly original take on the standard vegetarian pizza when my order arrived adorned with pumpkin and sweet potato along with the more usual olives, onions, tomatoes, spinach, green peppers, mozzarella and feta etc. It was absolutely delicious, presented on a crispy thin sourdough crust and with a heavenly hint of smokiness from that woodfired oven. This is regional food at it’s finest. Terroir comes to your pizza in rural East Cape province. Forget “Hawaiian” pineapple pizza, (and all who love to heap hate on them.) This smoky sweet potato pumpkin pizza is, for me, the new taste of South Africa: some of the usual suspects, some surprises, not taking itself too seriously but seriously satisfying and generous. Oh! So generous. Winner all the way.

It’s kind of tucked away in the coastal bush near the boat ramp and some exquisite Blue Flag beaches in Kenton, a little East Cape province coastal village which isn’t really anywhere on the major international tourist routes, (shhh…let’s keep it that way) but I highly recommend Pizzarella for atmosphere, authenticity, excellent and creative food offerings and friendly and professional staff.

A beach and a fresh baked loaf of bread: what better way to tell you where I’ve been and what happened.

Just up the road, my old home town of Bathurst (the South African Bathurst, not the Australian, Canadian, Argentinian, Gambian or the one in Sierra Leone) has also acquired some rather lovely lounging spaces since last I hung out in the area. I met some of the family diaspora “for coffee” under shady spreading trees at this lovely silvery leopard courtyard one morning. Battling with sleep’s desertion and confused circadian rhythms, I decided to stay off caffeine, and ordered a chai - or chai latte as it seems to be called on menus in South Africa. Sadly, I’ve decided that the East Cape cannot do the taste of India. This was the second place I tried. Even if I say so myself, I make a way better masala chai with my (secret) spice blend in my enchanted kitchen in the northern Chihauhauan desert. Several of us that morning were also convinced that our complimentary glasses of water were served with zucchini slices and not cucumber as one anticipates. Can one complain if it’s a complimentary item and nowhere is it written what it is?

Across the road from that leopard coffee place, which seems to go by the name That Coffee Place, (I would have called it The Coffee Spot because of the leopard but maybe that name was taken) is a very Knysna-in-the-eighties “shopping center”, a wonderful rabbit warren of old buildings and lush vegetation calling itself the Center of the Universe. The atmosphere is decidedly other dimensional.

I acquired ballast for the journey back to the desert: a few vintage South Africana kitchen linens for upcycling into ragbag aprons, and a couple of old tins, to put stuff in, at various places in this beautifully through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole, mad hatter’s tea party of a quirky shopping emporium. My old haunts revisited were such joyous places, lush, (they have had good rains) lovely and full of playful vitality. “Footfalls echo in the memory….”

I tried not to think about the headlines screaming from the newspaper rack at the grocery store in the little off the beaten path seaside village I was calling home for a too too brief two weeks.

As Anthony Bourdain said: I am happy I was there with my eyes open, and lived to see it, all of it. Even as I fumble today for words for the telling.

Recommended reading:

Ronnie Kasrils: The Unlikely Secret Agent. 2010. An award winning biography of a clandestine anti-apartheid agent and woman of immense courage, which reads like a fictional spy thriller.

It’s over 15 years since this slim book was published and 50 years since some of the events described, but this is an important story for this inflection point.

If we don’t learn from history, we will be condemned to repeat history.