In my mom’s kitchen, there were recipe boxes galore. I realise this dates me (as does the word galore). Few under 35 would have encountered these boxes or their contents: the food-splattered, faded, handwritten recipe cards, sometimes printed with “From the Kitchen Of…” and a sketch of a domestic icon – not Nigella, but a wooden spoon or old-timey stove. Shoved among these and the American commercial cookbook hits of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s were at least 20 of the next best holders of faithful family favourites: community cookbooks, which originated as a genre in the US, where I grew up.

These were the books my mom had collected, that were filled with recipes compiled by community groups, mostly with a Jewish connection. She knew many of the women who’d contributed the recipes. A few were hers. Their names were even in the books, alongside their recipes for layered gelatine moulds, gefilte fish and spinach dips.

Gelatine moulds were everywhere back in the day. Photo: Ian du Toit

When I learned that Errieda du Toit, South African food writer, author of the blog Huiskok and champion of home and heritage cooking, was researching a book about community cookbooks, I was instantly compelled to hear the story behind it. Released late in 2019, SHARE (and SAAM, the Afrikaans title) celebrates the recipe books lovingly compiled by churches and women’s agricultural associations, Lion’s Clubs and Scout groups, schools and organisations for the disabled, and even hobby interest groups, such as quilters and gardeners.

This is much more than a recipe book; although you’ll want to cook plenty of these recipes. A few words of warning: you may suddenly find yourself transported back to the 1970s and wondering why your kitchen walls are no longer avocado green. SHARE is a book you’ll want to linger over for its delicious celebration of South African food and women.

Fortunately, unlike my mom’s community cookbooks, SHARE has photographs, shot by Du Toit’s husband Ian and styled by Hannes Koegelenberg: who together have captured the perfect intersection of homely dishes with kitsch, in the form of doilies, cross-stitched tablecloths and Pyrex dishes.

SHARE brings to life the human side of community living – the good and the bad, but by far, mostly the good – the voices of thousands of women with an earnest desire to share their best cream scones or chicken casserole, to make another housewife’s life a little easier, to bring a bit of joy to another family. “The titles of these books reassure you,” Du Toit says in the book, with names like The Happy Cooker, Women in Aprons, Queen of Hearts and Find a Big Wooden Spoon.

Du Toit had always had community cookbooks, but her interest in diving deeper was spurred when she became the beneficiary of an extensive collection spanning five decades and the entire country, given to her by a cookbook enthusiast in her 80s. It was about the same time that Du Toit discovered a partially written manuscript for a community cookbook among her mother’s things, which was a total surprise. “She was always the doer, the organiser – it was one of the only things she never finished,” she says tearfully. The discovery gave her a huge sense of serendipity. Sadly, her mom passed away just as production of the book began.

Once Du Toit put the word out that she was embarking on this project, the books flooded in from friends. She poured over a century of books, written between 1918 and 2018 – that’s about 40,000 recipes (and the inherent significant eye strain) – eventually narrowing it down to 130 books to highlight. Those that met her criteria had to have a sense of community and create awareness about an issue or organisation, and/or were written for the purpose of charitable fundraising.

The recipes she features, which have all had an update to make them relevant to today’s cooks (with added suggestions to “Jazz It Up” and “Bring It Up to Date”), are straight from the source, and delivered with Du Toit’s insight and wit, along with accompanying anecdotes and historical context.

Take the Porcupines – funny little mince and rice frikkadels, which get their name because as they simmer, the white tips of uncooked rice swell up and look just like porcupine quills.

Porcupines – mince and rice frikkadels, which get their name because as they simmer, the white tips of uncooked rice swell up and look just like porcupine quills. Photo: Ian du Toit

The recipe came from Mrs A.J. Muller, published in the 1954 book Bloemfontein; What for Supper?, in the jubilee year of the CPWAA (VLV-Kaapland). Du Toit explains that she first saw the recipe in a 1930s cookbook, but the recipe originated in the US during the First World War. “I lost my heart… first it was the name of the dish, then the clever use of humble ingredients.”

With many of the cookbooks undated, her research was often more detective than culinary work. She’d find clues to a book’s origins from ingredient lists and even adverts from newspaper recipe clippings tucked in between the pages. The oldest dated book, Paarl Cookery Book, was compiled by the stallholders of the country market under the patronage of the Red Cross Society in 1918. Published at a time of great scarcity – the First World War – it surprised her that the recipes didn’t represent this. She likes to think of this as a show of hope: “That the abundant times would come again and one day they would be able to bake with butter and wheat flour!”

That said, most community cookbooks are concerned with thrift, making the load lighter and getting dinner on the table for the family as quickly as possible. Du Toit makes her way from the rich home baking tradition apparent in the first 50 years of these books, a time when what gave you a name in food circles was your hand at baking, through the ’60s and ’70s, when the advent of convenience food began to change the way women cooked and families ate – TV dinners and chip and dip entertaining – through to the international influences and kitchen technology of the ’80s and beyond.

Fridge tarts appeared in the Sixties, Errieda du Toit writes. This fig tart recipe originated in Koninklike geregte, AGS Sister Society, Durban Central, 1975. Photo: Ian du Toit

We chat about the sophistication of fridge tarts, which originated in the ’60s: she writes about them in a section called Technology Tarts. “Refrigeration was a luxury in the early part of the 20th century,” she explains. “When before you had to stoke the fire and make a pie crust, now you just had to beat something and put it in the fridge and all its foam and wonderful fruity taste came out of a box!”

And who doesn’t love Cremora Tart? Photo: Ian du Toit

While these shifts are taking place, so are those of gender roles. In the earlier books, recipe authors are known only by their husband’s names – i.e., Mrs Charles Roberts or Mev Anton de Villiers – but as time passes, they start to own their own first names in the books. In a sense, they become more their own persons. “If we do this properly, I thought, we give these tannies a voice and show them in all they were: they weren’t just sisters of the church; they had their own lives, their own aspirations; and they were fun, even naughty sometimes,” says Du Toit.

“Each community cookbook is a snapshot of a very specific time and place,” she adds, meaning that 30 years on, it no longer represents that community. Note that the term “snapshot” is a mental one, as these books, produced on slim budgets, didn’t contain photographs. “I had to rewire my brain to force myself to really read through a recipe, picture it and imagine what it would taste like – this was one of the single biggest things to get used to.”

There’s no getting around the fact that these cookbooks are the expression of the lives, tastes and concerns of middle-class white South Africans. Du Toit looked for books that reflected other cultures and races within South Africa but came up with nothing, although some of the books have occasional recipes contributed by people of colour (as deduced from surnames). This is our South African reality. There were gestures towards more inclusiveness in a few of the later books, but she often sensed an undercurrent of othering still at work.

Lekker chutney chicken. Photo: Ian du Toit

On a lighter note, there is the entertaining human drama between competitive recipe contributors: Du Toit purposely includes recipes for Savoury Tarts 1, 2 and 3, which is a nod to one of the most popular recipes in South African community cookbooks. “The person doing the editing wouldn’t want to offend a contributor, so you just included all three,” she jokes.   

Du Toit is very clear about the fact that she wrote this book for a younger audience; aiming for an older audience would be like preaching to the converted. In preparation, she chatted to many younger people, including her own nieces. “This generation is truly interested in something of meaning and value: they love retro and can see that the handwritten recipe represents something rare,” says Du Toit, who has had a lot of support from food designer Hannerie Visser, the founder of Studio H. and a generation younger. Visser, who grew up on a farm and is an avid community cookbook collector – Bak & brou van toeka tot nou was the one she grew up with – wrote the heartfelt foreword.

Du Toit believes that community cookbooks are an important reminder of the value of experience in this modern age, in which recipe Googling has become the default. “While blogs and Instagram will often come from the point of view of ‘hey this is what I discovered and here’s the recipe’, you go to the community cookbook recipes and that tannie has probably made that chocolate cake a thousand times… by the time she writes it down, she’s so good at it, she gets it exactly right every time.”

The book is also Du Toit’s call-out for a revival of caring and connected communities, something she feels we’ve lost sight of. “Being able to depend on sharing when there is need: that’s what these books represent. I think we are such a lonely society today, so poor in community life and rituals, even though we try to find other ways of filling the gaps, but there’s nothing like a pure sense of community. The role of communal eating and spending time around food and cooking is more necessary than ever.” DM

SHARE (SAAM), by Errieda du Toit, published by Struik Lifestyle (an imprint of Penguin Random House Struik)