Fracking: The Industrial Karoo – Fear&Loss runs in the South Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum from March 4 until April 26
* A Chef’s table: tacit:tactile (popular Karoo food with a twist)
* On March 5, March 26 and April 16 at noon at R350 a person:
“In creating a menu for this exhibition, my intention was to offer diners an experience that embraces the familiar and comfortable, but also engages and challenges them with sensory aspects of the landscape.
“The tacit addresses the comfort of the popular ingredients we easily and collectively associate with the Karoo: ostrich eggs, springbok, figs, olives, the blue sky. Beyond that lies the tactile.
“The challenge: to taste Karoo veldkos, to eat with your hands, to touch the Karoo soil…”
That’s chef/patron of Carlton Café Delicious, Rachel Botes, stating her mission for the formal announcement of a series of chef’s tables during the Fracking exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum in Arcadia which starts next week.
When she talks about the challenge, she reveals her love affair with the Karoo. “It’s my happy place,” she says for all the reasons previously stated.
But she’s also intent on reclaiming things from the past that might disappear forever if we don’t start paying attention. Anyone know about Persian lambtail rusks? “They used to render all the fat from the tails,” she explains and then the rusks had this spectacular hint of lamb.
She is realistic, however. “You have to work with what you have,” she says. You can’t plan to bring in foods from the veld that aren’t available at this time of year.
“During the course of these chef’s tables, some of the recipes will have to change because certain things won’t be available when the last lunches are presented.
“I’m not a purist,” she says. But she wants to illuminate the spirit of the Karoo in these particular meals.
The excitement for this remarkable chef is in the investigation, the experimenting with recipes and how a dish develops when they’re trying different things. Something she came up with was a vegetable dish, oumens(old person’s) beans, that was part of every table a few years ago – and still in some cases today. People might know it by different names, but basically it’s a mix of green beans, potato and onion, all boiled together. “Sometimes they added bones or meat for flavour,” she says.
With all of this in her head, she wanted to work with the concept but with a contemporary slant.
It expands her horizon and, when she is developing a menu like this, lots of her discoveries will make its way onto her daily menus in different ways. The green bean dish eventually transforms itself into an oumens bean soup, a lamb fricadel (“because of the lamb that was sometimes added to the beans”) as well as a curry component in a nod to curry beans, which finally emerges as an onion salsa with sultanas for a touch of sweetness.
When she starts talking veldkos(food from the veld), she’s talking confetti bush, wild garlic flowers, spekboom... perlargonium.
For example, taking in the strong scent of the pelargonium growing in front of her 13th Street deli, she discovered when baking that the pungency diminishes when baked if you don’t first take it through drying processes. But these are all the kind of experiments that this chef thrives on.
It’s about nostalgia, something she doesn’t underestimate because of the popularity of the melkkos and, more recently, the marmite tart – such huge hits at the Café.
For mains, meat is king in the Karoo and Rachel, who in the past few years has upped her meat game, will be making her own sausage, for example. “They use all kinds of different spices in the Karoo when making sausage,” she says. But again it is all about play. “Who says one can’t do bacon from lamb?” It’s these kinds of questions that send her on another flurry of foraging to discover what works and what does not. Confetti Bush pesto, for example, lamb-cured pastrami and springbok confit served with Catawba jelly to provide that much loved sweetness all come to mind.
To add greens and freshness from the Karoo, the star is a veld salad which will pretty much be determined by what they can find at that time in their own gardens,at the deli, and at home; and, with her presentation skills, predictions are that this one will be spectacular.
That and the dessert. Rachel does many things well, but baking is probably her triumph. She’s imaginative but she also understands the decadence factor that is so important when dealing with this particular element.
If you fancy flavours, there’s a milktart-infused pastry, a Turkish delight made with Soet Karoo wine (by a former Pretoria couple living in Prince Albert) and, at first, she planned a moskonfyt ice cream but found that it was too sweet and it was changed to fig.
All of these have a distinctly South African flavour and are brought together in a wonderfully eccentric fashion. But don’t even try to picture any of this. With her rich imagination, Rachel has often been confronted by a customer who wants to know about a particular dish because she has stretched the traditional into something more contemporary and of our time.
That’s what chefs do. If we were all still eating what our grandparents served on their tables, food would not have become such a fashionable item. It is all about looking at the past, going back to some of the goodness we remember, but presenting it in a way that makes sense in our world.
It’s about playing with the ideas, the recipes and the ingredients, discovering what is possible and what not. One of the young chefs in the Carlton kitchen, for example, got inventive with roasting some fresh vegetable seeds and found, to her delight, that it popped out tasting like popcorn!
You simply never know what will emerge.
When everything is done and dusted, Rachel is very clear about her mission and how she revives the magic time and again. “It’s all about the lost arts,” she says. “Someone has to do something!”
In her hands, expect fireworks.
Bookings for the chef’s tables: Anneke at Carlton Café, 012 460 7996, deli@carltoncafe.co.za.
The opening of the exhibition is on Wednesday (March 4) starting at 6.30pm and everyone is welcome. Saronsberg will be sponsoring wine as they will with the lunches and Rachel and her team will be providing snacks. But this night will focus on the art curated by Katie Barnard du Toit.