But this was all leading to my dessert, which had to have a name of its own, so I called it Chocolate Bête Noire, because if any of them survived it they’d be after my blood fro trying to kill them off with chocolate.

In the chill of a Yorkshire winter in what was then the West Riding of that large northern English county, where Cathy called for Heathcliff in whipping winds on grim moors, the pretty girl with wide-set cornflower blue eyes would have to hold her hand out to be stuck repeatedly with the back of a hairbrush when the orphanage carers – for want, perhaps, of another word – would deem some wrong to have been done.

The Mount Nelson is more than okay… it’s the grandest of all South African hotels, is steeped in colonial history and since it opened its doors in 1899, when a young Winston Churchill was among its first guests, the grand old Pink Lady near the upper end of the Company’s Garden in Cape Town has played host to the world’s rich and famous. ‘The Nellie’ is also where you get the most splendid High tea. Sliver went along to find out what it’s all about.

A banger is a clapped-out, stutter-start old car that knows the next stop is the breakers. A banger is an old rocker, a wizened Keith Richards who can’t see his fans any more but can still find his guitar chords. A banger is a heady cocktail of vodka, Galliano and orange juice, with a maraschino garnish to fool you into believing that a Harvey Wallbanger doesn’t pack a kick.

Now everything is the new everything else, and there’s no end in sight, and that’s the problem with an out-of-control cliché. It’s off and running, which of course is itself a cliché, but then again “no end in sight” is one too, as is “of course”, so we’re all doomed.

There would be no fly-by-nights here, and no flavour-of-the-month places that may well not be there by the end of the year. You can never be entirely sure, but if you follow your hunches and know your terrain, you have a reasonable shot at being right. (Visit www.sliver.co.za/?p=2125 for more about who won and how Sliver’s Silvers work.)

There was a splendid lunch awaiting us at Vergelegen’s new Camphors restaurant, where PJ Vadas, formerly of a very impressive stint at the Roundhouse in the Glen, overlooking Camps Bay, is now ensconced. It is quite clear that by hiring this award-winning chef, Vergelegen intends taking Camphors to the top.

Raindrops on roses, cream-coloured ponies, crisp apple strudel, schnitzel with noodles. Who drew up that bucket list? What was Julie Andrews on? Were those really snowflakes that were staying on her nose and eyelashes or some other white substance?

If I had R10 for every time a well-meaning friend has remarked, “I see Tony’s feeding the army again”, my bank manager wouldn’t be the dribbling wreck she has become. She might even be able to afford a lotion to salve her scalp in an effort to get the patches of hair to grow back that she has pulled out in nervous fits.

When my Karoo friend Elaine Hurford posted a Facebook status about how watermelon pips were the Next Big Thing in food, darlings, alarm bells went off everywhere, in my head, in the lounge, in the washing machine (actually, that might have been the end of the cycle), in the garden, in the street outside.

St Joseph’s Wort. I mean, really, St Joseph’s Wort. Who names plants? Who decides what herbs should be called? Fortunately, the name didn’t really catch on, evoking as it does a carbuncle on a monk’s hand, foot or worse.

Rainbow trout, which the Edwardians introduced to South Africa from the northern Pacific about a century ago, is the most beautiful fish, pearly on the outside, sensuously slinky to the touch – it will fly out of your hands of its own accord while you’re washing it under cold running water – and, when you slice into it once it’s cooked, offers you beautifully saffron-tinged flesh that is wonderful to eat.

Christmas, and then the detritus. Tawdry baubles suddenly looking out of place. Tinsel seeming much tattier than it did yesterday. The tree denuded, a parody of its formerly shiny, glittering self, like a party belle waking next morning with dishevelled ballgown and smudged mascara.

The future of South Africa’s restaurant industry is in safe hands, as Cape Town gourmand-about-town Aubrey Ngcungama informed his Facebook legions during a sunny lunch at the Granger Bay Hotel School Restaurant the other day. It sure is.

If it was the last night of the world, of my life, of your life, of all this, of everything, what would you dine on? What feast of the tastiest morsels of an interrupted lifetime of eating delicious things would pass your lips one last time?

ANNOUNCING the first annual Sliver’s Silvers – awards for great restaurants and great food in Cape Town and the Winelands, to be given by www.sliver.co.za. Coming early in the New Year – and featuring some very exciting innovative award designs. More to be revealed in due course.

This is not just any meal, but six fine courses of the food of the man who in my opinion is the finest chef working at the Cape at the moment. Peter Tempelhoff can put as much flavour in one tiny sliver of food as some chefs cannot quite manage to get in an entire hog on the spit. His modest, softspoken demeanour belies a skill that few chefs possess, even at this level, and quite frankly it was the Dom Pérignon that was having to hold up to the excellence of almost every morsel that was sent out.

This is a Christmas dinner party menu for that’s quick and affordable. I made the starter, a paté, in 25 minutes. The main course is a simple roast that’s been tarted up a little with a shiny coat. And the dessert is a cheat, plain and simple: store-bought vanilla ice-cream that’s been given a cheeky Christmassy lift – and it really does taste like a traditional mince pie. That took five minutes, not including the shopping.

Laurent and Cyrillia Deslandes have moved Bizerca uptown to Heritage Square, where their premises include the wind-protected courtyard at the square’s heart, and the masterstroke is that, while settling into the new space and giving it their own understated style, they also added something akin to placing a striking centrepriece on a dinner table to provide a talking point: an entire wall of the restaurant interior has been turned into a vertical herb garden.

And when you’ve gone that far, well, it’s not that much of a leap to find the little Christmas trees, sleighs, snowmen and, erm, penguins that help to make the finished product the truly kitsch thing a classic Christmas cake should be.

We often tend to take the basic ingredients of what we imagine to be an ethnic cuisine, give it a label and add it to our repertoire.Tomatoes, garlic, oregano? Italian. Same trio but add lemon? Greek. Take away the lemon and replace it with anchovy? Provencal.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, after decades of research and years of trials, the manufacturers of whites, blacks, coloureds, coconuts, Indians, plurals, tricamerals, old-style liberals, diehard Nats, Oranians, black diamonds — basically of anyone you know or have ever known — have invented a whole new race which, with immediate effect, replaces all races that have gone before, rendering them null and void.

Pork is the chicken of red meat. Like a blank canvass waiting only for the masterly ministrations of an adept chef, it shares with chicken that ability to take on all manner of flavours, from lemon, fresh herbs, honey or mustard to eastern ingredients from soy to rice wine, star anise to cardamom.

We traversed the entire country, and always the night stop, my sister and I each in our own hotel bedrooms, hearing the dinner gong as a man in a uniform wandered up and down the corridors tinkling a xylophone. I’d have to wear a white shirt, tie and jacket and we’d go down for the first sitting, soup – consommé, cream of tomato or celery – then poached fish with sauce, and more ofen than not roast leg of lamb or beef with three veg and gravy.

You could pick up this Port Elizabeth restaurant and plonk it down at Cape Town’s Waterfront or in some sunny beach-side spot in Camps Bay or Kalk Bay and it would give many other local eateries a run for their money.

It was a “safari” because there were four young winemakers, each of whom had brought along a wine to show off, tell us about and share with us, all the while being matched to a particular dish by executive chef Roland Gorgosilich and his highly skilled team. In effect, we all stayed put at our tables, while four winemakers moved from table to table with each course.

Here’s a thought. The debate about whether Heritage Day in South Africa should be called Heritage Day or Braai Day is easily resolved. Let’s just call it National Braai Heritage Day, and all boxes are ticked, and sommer make Jan Braai president for a day while we’re about it.

Animals, says South Africa’s reigning braai guru, Jan Braai, eat grass, leaves and vegetables which they then convert to meat. Now this is a tremendously wise saw, and makes perfect sense. To take this wisdom to its logical conclusion, then, one must urge all vegetarians to adopt a meat diet at once to ensure that they get all that wonderful vegetable nutrition.

My friends over at Posh Galore haven’t featured in this column for a while, but I’m sure they would frown upon the thought of me dredging up a hasbeen old kitchen favourite again, on this dubious occasion the sadly lamented “Avocado Ritz”.

The thing about beech-smoked pork loin is that it has a decidedly bacony flavour, if not texture. The texture of the flesh is nothing at all like bacon, and also is not much like a slow-roasted slab of pork belly, which it closely resembles. But it has far less fat than an equivalent sized piece of pork belly, and with the subtle smoking it attains a flavour more reminiscent of your end-of-year hunk of Christmas gammon than it does anything else.

There are still millions of people who continue to call sparkling wine Champagne because they really couldn’t be bothered about a silly rule imposed by the Alcoholic Word Police. What are they going to do, arrest them? And who could police it anyway? Shall we tell our already overworked police, “Sersant, just drop that murder you’re rushing to, we’ve got a serious case at a party in Sea Point of a lady offering her guests Champagne when quite clearly what she is pouring for them is South African sparkling wine, and that’s not all – it’s not even a methode Cap Classique, it’s cheap s***. Bring her in.”

I wouldn’t steak my career on this, but a steak is a slab of beef, nothing more, nothing less. But suddenly you can have steak almost anything. Big slab of lamb? Lamb steak. Great hunk of mushroom? It’s a steak.

There’s a white gown and silly white towelling slippers in the locker. I change into them, feeling as foolish as an Earthling who has strolled into an experimental chamber on Battlestar Gallactica by mistake. One wrong move and humanoids will come in, tie me up and inject me with something luminous green that turns me into jelly. I am very grumpy and ready to run.

If your traditional English breakfast comprises two rashers of lean bacon, grilled to drain away the fat, a grilled sausage, a halved tomato cooked in a little olive oil and two poached eggs, how unhealthy is that really? No sugar anywhere in sight, for one thing. So, next time I sit down tobreakfast at the Wimply I’m going to demand the health breakfast, and only two rashers of bacon please, eggs sunny-side up.

My search for the best in curries in a country that has very many Indian restaurants but far too few worth writing home about had finally found a place that seriously pressed all the right buttons, even the button that says ‘more please’ because this is the kind of buffet where you can well and truly stuff yourself.

This is what Ivor Powell wrote about An Audience with Miss Hobhouse in Weekend Argus on Saturday, September 8

There’s a vivacious, buxom Latina in your glass of pinot noir at Haute Cabriere, and she’ll entice you with fine morsels and tempt you to indulge enough to let your hair down and languish there until you are replete with wine, food and life. That is what Achim von Arnim, owner of all things Cabriere, including the farm and winery, the Pierre Jourdan label and its derivatives and this wonderful restaurant, is all about.

Cabbage is the spotty kid who sits in the corner at the back of the class and waits for the bell to ring, then dawdles out of class slinking into the shadows in the hope that the bullies-in-chief won’t shove his head in the sandpit again.

Cabbage is the quietly talented kid who composes songs in his head but never sings them, knowing – or scared – that if he does, all the other kids will laugh and teacher will frown the frown that says, “That kid write songs? Never.”

Cabbage is the kid who dreads the day in school when you all have to stand up, one by one, and walk to the front of the class to give an oral. Facing the class is the worst thing for Cabbage Kid. They stare at you willing you to mess up, so you do. You compose a clever speech in your head but the brain doesn’t send the right speech to your vocal chords and the one that comes out is some jumbled nonsense verse that you don’t even recognise yourself.

If cabbage were an athlete, it would be the one trailing at the back while the leeks, the broccoli, the organic mangetout and especially the carrots – always, always the carrots – streak ahead and across the finishing line. Cabbage just doesn’t believe in itself. And when you don’t have self-belief, you founder. The rocks call you like wreckers on the Cornish coast flashing their evil lights at night to lure you to the shore. It’s pretty dire to be a cabbage.

When we, the scribes who must observe the world and record it, see you, the people who spend up to two hours in the middle of your week day reclining in a chair with gorgeously plated and garnished food and wine set before you, we marvel and think, how do they do that?

Flaky people tend to be more intelligent than the rest. There’s all this stuff going on in your head, all of that creativity jangling together like Tubular Bells. And no one does flake better than the Brits. Okay, maybe the French. Almost. But add a good dollop of eccentricity to a Brit and you have the makings of entertainment drawn in broad, dayglo strokes.

Anyone who writes about food and cooks the occasional beef fillet or writes about ordering one in a restaurant will have encountered this conundrum. You say, aloud, a sentence containing the word fillet, pronouncing it “fill it”, and sure as a downpour follows a warm, clear Cape winter’s day, someone within earshot will pipe up and “correct” you.

This is not the side of food column writing that you normally get to see. You probably imagine it to be all fine dinner parties and genteel patter while cool music wafts in the air and things gently simmer and bubble in gorgeous little pots and the expectant hordes drool imperceptibly into their bibs at the sheer wonder of the impeccable repast shortly to be set before them.

It’s a bit like having lunch with the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey. You wonder if the staff must get into huddles of confusion and consternation somewhere in the wings as they try desperately not to embarrass her ladyship while she’s entertaining guests for lunch.

It’s all Alice’s fault, apparently, or maybe Humpty Dumpty’s. More correctly, we can blame Lewis Carroll, who in Through The Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (150 years ago, in 1872) invented the notion of a portmanteau, which in recent years has sprung into fashionability with the hybridisation of the names of Hollywood stars.

Woolies recently seemed to take a flyer and stock up on chunky tubs of duck fat, something that I have occasionally asked for over the past couple of years, always to be met with a puzzled frown, as if to say, “Why the hell would anybody want to buy that?”

Winter in Cape Town. Grey. Dank. Soggy ground under your boots. Endless ceiling of thunderous clouds overhead. Stack of umbrellas in a basket at the front door, half of them broken from over-use. Temperatures constantly around 10degrees. On a good day. Right? Have another look at the main picture. I took it in mid-June. In Cape Town.

Isn’t life strange? You wait forever for your favourite bands and singers to visit South Africa – and they do. Only they wait 50 years before getting around to it and when they finally get here they’re utterly overshadowed by somebody called Lady Gaga, who (you are told) clads herself in meat and whose only redeeming feature seems to be that she is not Justin Bieber.

Other than Alex, who was elegantly turned out in pink and blue and yellow and oh, I could go on and on, it was easy to tell which ones were the wine judges. They all had teeth stained with the red-black detritis of a thousand wines. It was like being at the closing night dinner of a vampire convention. You flinched if one of them came near.

In the mountains where Syria meets Lebanon, where a tyrant annihilates his own people while his wife shops for Prada and G&B online and everybody knows the sound and smell of war, there grows wild thyme called za’atar.

It’s not only that it starts some time in August and slowly builds up a head of steam until it all but mows you down with its cargo of baubles and tinsel and carols and turkey with all the trimmings, all marinating in mulled wine and eggnog. It’s more than that. It takes over theBritish Isles as surely as if it had been conquered by a white-bearded Laplandish dictator in a red and white suit with an army of wild-eyed elves.

The tomato has been said to be just one chromosome removed from the human being. (I know – I also know some people like that.) This must be very worrying for tomatoes. Looking at the human world around them, they must marvel that they are almost capable (but for a solitary chromosome) of the kind of evils their human cousins are able to indulge in.

A good formula should not be messed with. No one wants to hear you say, ‘Well, I made five spice but I changed it – I used goji berries instead of the star anise and pumpkin seeds instead of the fennel. Oh, and I left out the cinnamon. And the cloves.”

But perhaps the most unique fish of all when it comes to distinctive flavour is salmon. That extraordinary saffron colour is a thing of beauty in its own right, but find a good piece of Norwegian or Scottish salmon and you have one of the finest fishes you can put on a plate. There’s something of the richness and oomph of Beluga caviare about that intense blast of flavour, and yet it can, for all its taste intensity, take a surprisingly subtle sauce by way of accompaniment.

If Camps Bay is diamante and faux fur, Constantia is engraved antique silver and the mink stole gran left you. How to hybridise this odd couple? When you’re as rich and ambitious as Paul Kovensky, you take a 30-year lease on one of the oldest properties in that lush stretch of vineyard and manure, you send in Stefan Antoni interiors to add some faux glitz to the old gilt-framed grandeur, and you sit back to see what the well-heeled Mr and Mrs Constantia make of it all.

Ribbetjies. Spare ribs. They’re as manly as food can get. If they were human, they’d be packed with testosterone and as sexist as a bible-thumping Utah polygamist. If ribbetjies had arms and legs, they’d be as muscled as the guy on the cover of Men’s Health, and ripple like a discus thrower at the Olympics whose girlfriend is in the crowd. If ribbetjies could talk, they’d sound like Russell Crowe after a night of drinking neat Jack followed by a good round of throwing things at photographers.

Pointing out to chef that he was much prettier than the Master Chef judges and that he had better hair than Pete Goffe-Wood did not seem to make any impression at all on him, and we were not the outright winners.

This is something that Gautengers do not seem able to understand. To many from north of the mighty Vaal, where weather is presumed to be as regular as the daily afternoon thunderstorm, there are thought to be two Cape seasons – one constantly windy, the other constantly wet.

Offal is such an ironic food, if you think about it. It’s the cheapest red meat going, to be found at the bargain bin end of the supermarket or butchery fridge. It’s eaten by the poorest people of the world, and often thought of as “peasant” food, not that we would apply the term in South Africa, although they would and do in France.

There’s something about a T-bone. (The meat-shy might like to look away at this point.) It’s a quartet of things. The T-shaped bone gives the meat attached to it more flavour. The layer of fat, which must be left on so that the meat near it can absorb its tenderising essences.

I would sooner leap off a cliff backwards singing Climb Every Mountain than lie under a car in Table View on a Saturday afternoon with a rugby commentary plugged into my ears, a spanner in my hand and the knowledge that if the jack dislodges itself, my beer boep will keep the car up. I have more understanding of cooking, because it makes more sense to me, techno-challenged as I am.

You know you’ve arrived at a good address when the hotel manager greets you in the foyer and announces cheerily, “You’ve come at a propitious time. We’ve just heard that the Cambridges are moving in across the way.”

Now Robin and Anushia have resurfaced with a restaurant in their own right, Nush, in Plein Street opposite the old Sars premises. Nush is an abbreviation of Anushia’s name, but also sounds a bit like ‘nosh’ and vaguely munchy, and somehow it makes an appealing name for a restaurant.

GIORGIO Nava stands out among chefs at the Cape, not only for his distinctly gentlemanly Milanese style and exquisite Italian accent and suave air but for the astonishing level of his visibility when you’re in his restaurant. He’s all over the place, which makes you think that either he doesn’t have his eye on the ball (the ball in the kitchen, that is) or he has his team so expertly trained that he can afford the time to get to know his guests.

Turkey and all the trimmings in the middle of what could turn out to be a hot summer (Christmas) day. Hmmm. Not really conducive to that vast, hot meal with three veg followed by a luxurious Christmas pudding with brandy sauce, is it?

Cape of spice. Cape of fruit. At the Cape, we have an abundance of both, so when faced with neatly trimmed organic pork chops and an empty frying pan, it’s time to raid the spice rack. But don’t get carried away. Pork, despite coming from such a huge beast, has a delicate flavour, and does not benefit from spices being chucked at it with wild abandon.

Pity the poor ostrich. Not the prettiest of old birds to begin with, let’s be honest. The only beautiful thing about you is your feathers, and they pluck them off you to sell to rich Frenchwomen, drag queens, Rio carnival dancers and Lady Gaga. To a human kid, you’re a horse with feathers. You think ‘those kids are biltong’ but mommy and daddy are watching, so you make it look less obvious that you’re trying to throw them off.

Offering a surprise menu — you have no idea what you’re getting — is the restaurant industry’s equivalent of bungee-jumping. It’s out-there stuff, and pretty exhilarating if you’re prepared to harness up and fling yourself over the culinary edge.

When you’re curing salmon for a man who makes witblits for fun, you know you have to chuck in something fairly potent. I’m not sure that curing the fish actually IN witblits, a liquor of a proof so high that it may or not be on either this or that side of the law to do so (I may or may not be hedging my bets here), is entirely a good idea (or not, as may or may not be the case). In any event, what we do know, unequivocally, is that it is not illegal to include tequila in a salmon cure, and I’ll drink to that. I think.

Yet for all that, chef-owner Bertus Basson manages to turn out plates of food worthy of the finest Michelin-star rated restaurants of Europe in an otherwise modest eatery barely 40 minutes drive from central Cape Town, and at prices that make you wonder just how much profit the competition makes. Got to respect that.

Having earlier than that worked with Mike Bassett in the restaurant at the Radisson at the V&A Waterfront, it has taken Pillay a long time to come into his own, but it seems he has found the right sort of niche to show off the enormous amount he has learnt, not only about cooking for a fine dining restaurant, but the nuts-and-bolts aspects of running what is essentially a business.

Koppies in all directions. Lowslung mountains with milky purple coats. Verges of tufted fynbos, knobbly Karoo herbs and an occasional scrunched Coke can. Ry-gos interrupt you with an enforced break for a stretch and a waft of the cigarette smoke from the rally dudes in the logo-spangled 4×4 in front. Giant trucks grind past, blowing you back into your car as the blanket-wrapped marshal lady steps out of her booth and moves the Stop sign, waving you to go.

The silliest thing about a braai is the moment when the man with the beer boep and the silly grin cracks open a can of beer and pours it over the flames, while the guests suck in a breath and let out the deep sigh of those who know their dinner is going to be late. And possibly wet.

Is it its name that makes us think of kingklip as the king of South African fish? Is it like being called Elvis? Is it like being born Michael Jackson with feet that start shufflling to Billie Jean even as the baby’s head appears? You’re alive. You’re a kingklip. And you rule.

My parents had both, as Yorkshire folk, somehow been influenced in the kitchen by their cousins across the channel, and those methods rooted in the humblest kitchens of the French rural peasant were practised in our kitchen in farflung Namibia. I love the deeply reduced, luscious sauces, the deglazing of the pan to capture every last of the essences that have been developing during cooking.

IT WAS a potjie day in Arniston. A potjie day is one where the sun is a little slow to reveal itself, there’s just a tad too much windchill for a braai, but it’s too warm to hang around indoors. It’s a shoulder season thing. Half-warm, half-cool, the Weather Gods dithering about in fence-sitting mode. You put on a jacket, put your back to the breeze coming off the turquoise sea, and think, $#@% it, I’m gonna make me a potjie, crack a bottle of wine and enjoy the view.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that a fish restaurant must be expensive – no more ‘free from the sea’. Far from it. This in a city surrounded, arguably, by two oceans. Glass-half-empty people will say the Indian and Atlantic meet at Cape Agulhas. But I’d sooner align myself with those who fancy savouring what’s still in the glass.

Frangelico is pure, heavenly nectar even when sipped in its virginal essence. It should be fed to anyone whose idea of attaining an afterlife is to follow a random American preacher’s advice, give away all his possessions, foist the cat onto some unsuspecting third cousin, and check into a hotel to wait for the end. One sip and they’d be raptured to a place they’d never been to before. Not heaven though, just a really cool spot in their own heads where mellow people go for an hour or two when they’ve had a few drinks.

WOKE up Sunday morning, yawned, looked out the window. Glorious day. Not a cloud in the sky, head didn’t hurt. Didn’t need an organically-brewed Fair Trade beer for breakfast, never mind one more for dessert. Perfect, just perfect. A perfect day for killing some sacred cows.

Chicken pie is as Cape as bobotie, waterblommetjiebredie and the Cape Doctor. Made in the old Cape Dutch tradition, it contains sago, diced ham, hardboiled egg, mace, allspice and other flavourings typical of the cuisine. Altogether an odd recipe, if you think about it, but seriously good and a perfect hearty winter meal.

Having bought a piece of pork belly, I decided to throw caution to the winds and approach it from an entirely new persective: foil. The theory was that the foil would become a mini oven within an oven, and any liquids would remain at the bottom of the foil parcel, with the fat near the top, untouched by liquids that could keep the pork soggy.

REUBEN Riffel has travelled a long way from his
wrong-side-of-the-tracks Franschhoek beginnings to his position at the
helm of a very highbrow restaurant at one of the Mother City’s most
luxurious hotels.

PEOPLE often want to know what my favourite restaurant is, expecting it to be some prissy fine dining palace, all starched and minimalist and where only the freshest of fresh ingredients are served by waiters who like to cadge a bit of a grope while they’re bestowing the damask napkin on your lap.

AROMATICS are the heated flavourings that give a dish its essence, its heart. Aromatics impart the distictive peaks of taste and fragrance that make you remember a dish, set it apart from other dishes, and make you want to make it again.

Boeber is as ‘Cape Town’ as Cape brandy tart, the Cape Doctor, over-priced fancy-schmancy restaurants and claims that ‘it has never rained like this/blown like this/been so hot at this time of the year before’.

Last week I spotted something I had seen once or twice before but never tasted – dragonfruit. They’re bright pink, almost cerise, in hue and have little nobbles on their skins that make them look like little gay dragons. But nothing prepares you for what they look like inside. Beneath that hard pink shell is a second even pinker layer of softer flesh, but within that is a large oval centre of pure white fruit speckled with tiny black seeds. It is too beautiful for speech.

This was the Springbok flank of shanks. Meaty and moist and superbly browned and reeking of exotic flavours, and yes, Butch, it was a ginormous one too. A very manly shank, worthy of fitting the space between a Springbok rugby boot and a bruised knee.

The racks had been given a French trim. (Calm yourself, Daisy, it has nothing to do with a Brazilian. It means the bones have been trimmed and excess fat removed.)

IF our national flower is the protea, our national vegetable is you-know-who and our national sport is soccer … I mean rugby (hey, you guys can fight it out, I prefer boules), our national meat has to be lamb. Whether it’s cooked on the braai, on the spit or in a potjie, roasted in the oven, turned into sosaties, into a Durban curry or a Cape Malay breyani, it’s the one meat that unites our dark carnivorous hearts. Lamb was on the menu at two launches I attended recently. One was a new theatre restaurant, the other a regular summer spitbraai on a wine farm.

Preserved lemons are just brilliant, and ridiculously versatile. You can use them pulped to enhance a savoury sauce, chop them into a vegetable dish or stirfry, add them to a stuffing for whole-roasted poultry or a roulade, pummel them into a paste with olives and garlic to spread on bruschetta or a pizza, or pop some into a salad dressing.

Akhni is the kind of spice blend that should be celebrating the Cape on at least half of the local restaurant menus, yet I don’t recall ever having seen it outside of a recipe book or a friend’s dinner table. Why is that? The dish screams “Cape cuisine” yet ask all the major chefs cooking for our thronging tourists if they serve akhni on their menus, or even know what it is, and I reckon you’d be met with a sea of blank expressions.

History repeats itself. La Colombe had a brilliant chef who grew an international reputation for the Constantia restaurant and earned it a slew of awards. Then he left and started his own, more modest, eatery. La Colombe found a brilliant replacement, who clawed back its international reputation and earned it a slew of awards. But now he too has left and opened his own, more modest, restaurant.

The tide was coming in, Di and Annie moved further up the beach, and we continued gamely with our quest, even though we were now thigh-deep in water and the sun was fast disappearing. Finally, figuring we had enough or at least as many as the rising tide was going to allow us before the sea claimed two more souls to add to the roll call of those who have been sacrificed to the salty brine of Arniston, we gave in.

Best advice to the apostrophically challenged (after being cautioned that it would be best not to attempt any writing outside of a Twitter account) is to suggest that they should never use an apostrophe at all rather than do what most of them do, which is to fling an apostrophe in a sentence wherever they see an “s” at the end of a word. “Prawn’s with olive’s and tomatoe’s”.

A Frenchwoman had set up a stall selling these Moroccan cooking vessels and sundry other pots, all ceramic and beautiful. I bought a blue ceramic tajine and the lady, with whom I had been chatting about Moroccan food and how the conical lid of a tajine works, smiled and gave me two additional pots, medium and small, to fit inside the tajine base like Russian dolls.

Nuts, fruit and liqueur all scream “Christmas” and this week’s triple-course dinner pushes all those buttons. Start with a pleasingly nutty soup of wild mushrooms and ground walnuts with a dash of sherry, go on to a stuffed loin of pork with crunchy crackling, and end with a deliciously old-fashioned black cherry and maraschino trifle dressed up for the season.

The tang of liquor is as much a part of the Christmas spirit as fruit, nuts and those silly costumes Santa Claus wears. Flame brandy or whisky over a pudding, add a glass to yourself along the way a la Keith Floyd, and the headier side of the yuletide is ignited.

Making a good first impression is often the most important moment in a relationship, or even the difference between a relationship and none at all. I remember one of my first dates as a 16-year-old. She was a farm girl from the Northern Cape and I was a fidgety youth who’d been paired with her for her family’s visit to the Douglas agricultural show. Why? I have no idea why. You’re 16, you’re visiting your sister in some cement making town even the people living there have never heard of, and next thing you’re in the back of a car with a plump farm girl who thinks you’re a big city catch, on your way to a whole lot of humiliation.

The seasoned Xtreme Cook of course will have planned meticulously, as I did when planning to cook osso buco. I’d had the foresight (as one does) to order the veal shank cutlets through a chef contact. I thought it would be really “out there” to cook them the contemporary way, but decided to go for the traditional recipe because it tastes better. When you’re about to fling yourself into culinary infinity, such crucial concerns as taste and texture achieve a particular clarity. (Your whole life flashes before you, actually.)

Pickled fish is one of those things people almost instinctively turn their noses up at. Sometimes some of the best things in life are just taken for granted. It’s the prophet in his own country syndrome – you know him so well that you just can’t believe he really could be such a clever dude.

A slice of a terrine, served as a starter with crusty bread and a dollop of a sweetly spicy relish, is as French as a downturned nose with a garnish of raised eyebrow. And it’s great as a Christmas starter…

Raymond Blanc being very French and very precise, in that stubbornly Gallic way, he insists they be cooked at 85C, which means bringing the dish to that temperature in a 95C oven, which sounds more Irish than French. Whatever – being South African of Yorkshire stock with Irish habits, I cooked it at 100C and kept an eye on it.

How to cook your potatoes for Christmas dinner? Here are some ways… The German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a diet consisting predominantly of them “leads to the use of liquor”, which would be enough for some of us to stockpile them, just in case.

Oldtime recipes are sometimes worth bringing back. An earlier generation dined out on prawns or shrimps Marie-Rose, a sauce that is ridiculously easy to stir up – literally – and has a wonderful tang beyond the suggestion of its simplicity. And it makes for a perfect Christmas dinner starter.

The chef came out before a particular course and explained, somewhat nervously, that the kingklip was to be served raw tonight. Riiiiiiight, we muttered, dubious, looking left and right as if wondering where the candid camera was.

Tony Jackman pays tribute to the late Mark Swift, poet, journalist, romantic, womaniser, drinker, colleague and friend