Abalimi in Soiled and Seeded

The second edition of Soiled and Seeded went live today. The not-for-profit e-zine is Toronto-based but international in scope and covers all things gardening: its mission is "to cultivate a garden culture that restores our connection to the natural world and redefines our relationship to plants."

My overview of Abalimi bezekhaya's work is in this winter edition.

You will also find stories about an 81-year-old Californian inventor-composter, an ode to a winter garden in Germany, and a gallery of pictures from an unusual Toronto corner store, posted by Soiled and Seeded's co founder Mikaël Lavogiez. And more.

Speaking of carrots. I tested my carrot soup recipe the other night (it helps to do that every once in a while), and found a rather delicious variation, adding orange juice.

Malva pudding

 Pelargonium capitatum

I started editing photos this morning - inbetween helping rescue and being bitten by a lost dachshund, another story - for a post about a hike above Muizenberg and became side-tracked by a quest for the origin of malva (mahl-fah) pudding.

It is on every menu in every restaurant in South Africa. It is touted as deeply traditional Cape cookery and is waved like a sweet culinary flag of welcome at visitors who suffer its every incarnation with remarkable fortitude and loosened belts. Malva pudding is South Africa. It is the Frenchie's favourite dessert.

My question is simple. Does the origin of the dessert have anything to do with the family Malvaceae, specifically pelargoniums whose common Afrikaans name is malva?

On this hike we passed a pelargonium I have seen frequently but never really noticed. Its common Afrikaans name is kusmalva (kus rhymes with Swiss ) or coast malva - and it is Pelargonium capitatum, native to this coast. Its leaves are highly, rosily perfumed, its flowers a pretty pink, and the first thing I thought, was, malva pudding!

I have pored over all of mother's oldest books, going back to 1918:

Lily Haxworth Wallace's Rumford Complete Cookbook, which I only later discovered was published in Rhode Island in 1918 (by the Rumford Chemical Works?!?) - it was my grandmother's go-to cookbook, was fascinating, but of no use as far as local food history goes; then the South African, 1952, Old Time Recipes, published by The Cape Times; on to Hilda Gerber's Cape Cookery, approx. 1950, as well as her Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays (this edition 1957); Mary Higham's Household Cookery for South Africa (thirteenth edition, 1945); C. Louis Leipoldt's Cape Cookery (Flesch, 1976) and Our Best Traditional Recipes, by Vida Heard and Lesley Faul (1975).  Plenty of fodder for plenty of food stories but...

No malva pudding. Nada. No trace. Not a whiff.

Sussssssssspicioussssssss. For such a 'traditional' dessert.

Then I hit the Interwebs. Loads and loads of speculation. From saying it was named after a woman called Malva (Colin Cowie made the claim, apparently, telling the world this theory after it was served at the school Oprah founded), to citing Madeiran wine, to local chef Topsi Venter suggesting it is related to 'geraniums', an explanation I like and want to believe, though the word is incorrect - the scented leaves she has in mind are the pelargoniums, family Malvaceae, to a South African-born California gal who makes and sells it describing it with a lead-off that is too wonderful for words:

"The country of South Africa is a melting pot of Afrikaners (Cape Dutch), British, Indians, as well as other Europeans and Asians, their cultures and their food."

Um. Africa. South Africa....Africans? Might Africans feature anywhere in that melting pot?

Apparently not.*

[*Update 1/25/11 - Kari has emailed the site administrators and will correct this error]

Then there is South African food personality Michael Olivier, who claims to have started the craze in the 70's, after he hired his friend, Maggie Pepler who "had the original recipe" to come and work at Boschendal's restaurant. It is a well-known tourist venue, a wine estate with beautiful Cape Dutch architecture, wonderful garden, gets lots of traffic. The explanation seems plausible. It rings true, though no one else quotes it. "The original recipe" part is vexing. What original recipe, from whom, derived from where?

Where is Maggie Pepler? Maggie Pepler might in fact be Malva Pudding. Could her recipe be the original recipe, influenced presumably by vinegar puddings, sticky Dutch puddings, and perhaps by her own appetite. And the malva part?

I am fascinated. Let's see what Mr Olivier has to say.

I'll be back. With the myth of malva pudding. As delicious as it can be, ain't nothing traditional about it. Child of the 70's, and possibly of Maggie Pepler's.

If you know more, please get in touch.

[Postscript: After learning more, with lots of help from readers - Malvasia wine - and some tinkering, here is the recipe I came up with for a passable version of the dessert.]

Mon mari

Smooth sailing is for sissies. 

You are the light of my life. 

Three years feel like three months feels like 30 years...

Lunch on a tray

Eating amaranth

Wild greens have been cooked by people for as long as they have been hungry.

We pulled this pigweed (umtyutyu in Xhosa, probably Amaranthus retroflexus in Latin, and in South Africa pigweed is purslane, but I'm not talking about purslane!) a few days ago from the sandy soil of a garden in Khayelitsha and another in Nyanga. It sprawls on the soil, its seed heads crowning the rosettes of leaves.

Selina explained to a gardener at the Nyanga Garden Centre that we eat these greens and enjoy them. The gardener's response was politely derisive. Now that vegetable gardens have arrived and micro farming has begun on a small scale in these townships, the weeds that for decades fed people who were forced to gather wild greens in order to stave off real hunger and deprivation, are scorned by urban gardeners: If we have green peppers and tomatoes and carrots, why do we need this food that we ate when we had nothing? Rural women new to the city still come and gather the weeds for the pot in these gardens, and are welcomed for the free labour they provide, but their eating habits are dismissed as backward.

Rich farmers eradicate the weed on an industrial scale. Small farmers pull it out.

It is significantly more nutritious than spinach and tastes better, too, to my palate. The Old People knew this. We have forgotten.

Some of the well heeled and supposedly well educated CSA members who receive boxes of vegetables every week from The Harvest of Hope, share this withering opinion, rejecting the occasional bunches of nettles and not loving my evangelically promoted purslane carefully tucked in with the other fresh produce for R95 (approx. $13.86) per box. They have not yet been confronted with a posy of pigweed. Evil grin.

I can't help becoming exasperated. I live in that little bubble of blogging and consuming and growing that lauds Local and recognizes edible weeds and wild plants for what they are - interesting and delicious vegetables in their own right. So to come down to earth, where only bona fide 'produce' rules (SOMEONE had to bite into the first tomato, for goodness' sake!), to realize that the world of local food magazines and roof farm blogging is not the real world at all,  is something of a culture shock. It is hard to believe that someone capable of buying and reading a glossy magazine or subscribing to an excellent CSA is not capable of sauteeing some nice, iron-rich pigweed for their bruschetta or tossing some outrageously healthy purslane (Omega 3! Vitamin C!) into their green salad. Nor capable of the most superficial research, a mouse-click away.

Sigh. Spread the word. Why should these subsistence farmers throw away this healthy, valuable green stuff, when it could be turned not only into health but into profit? The best chefs in Manhattan are loading UP on wild greens. And the suburbs and the small and large farms are saying, No thanks, it's a weed, you can't fool us.

 Gathering pigweed to eat from a garden in Khayelitsha

Regardless. As we speak, a succulent stew of pigweed and chicken and yogurt is bubbling on the stove (I imagine it to be slightly east-of-the-Adriatic in flavour, the kind of recipe Paula Wolfert might have teased from a mountain woman). A bredie is a slow-cooked South African stew, and is usually made with lamb and one particular seasonal vegetable; milk products would not feature. Still, there is a seasonal vegetable - the leafy amaranth, supported by sweet leeks, and it took its time cooking. So I'm calling it a bredie. The result is creamy, tangy, silky.

The recipe is next door at 66 Square Feet (the Food).

If you live in Cape Town and want to eat well, want to know what you are eating,  and through doing so want to support a peerless cause that teaches people to grow food for themselves and sell it, too, consider subscribing to The Harvest of Hope's weekly CSA box. The 'real' vegetables, leaves and herbs are local and are grown using organic methods. They are grown by farmers who cultivate their own home crops on the same land, and who are under contract to Harvest of Hope to supply a given quantity of crops throughout the year.

And if you are lucky, you might find a bunch of weeds in there, too. If you are wise, you will welcome them.

A weed is in the eye of the beholder. And the more you know, the more you eat.

South African mint

A couple of years ago I saw this mint growing beside a clear, cold stream on the dry, dry road to De Hel. I presumed it to be an invader. But Mentha longifolia is native-born, and now I see it with a rush of pleasure, because I like all mints, and am happy that this one is not taking over this part of the world. Its strong peppermint scent is an instant tonic and it is put to all the usual traditional uses via teas: coughs, colds, respiratory tract infections, bad smells of all kinds, and as an insect repellent rubbed onto skin and clothes. It grows tall, and likes sun, but is as fond of water as its cousins, so will spread if allowed to. There is a great bank of it growing at the bottom of the pelargonium koppie at Kirstenbosch and some more in the Fragrance Garden.

All of which makes me thirsty for a mojito...

The fairest Cape

Adenandra uniflora, on Ou Kaapseweg, above Cape Town.

Wind-chopped Scarborough.

Hout Bay from Chapman's Peak.

Peter and Veronica Walsh and Wally and Elaine van Rooyen liked the view of Hout Bay well enough to leave their white impressions on the stones in the wall between the road and cliffs. Glynis and Lauren Walsh, and would that be Maudene van Rooyen, with Weldon van Rooyen, who concurred?

Do they know they are going to leave their uninteresting graffiti when they leave home, and take white stuff with them? Is this what rock art might boil down to?

Ja nee.