Named cooks, especially if they have signature dishes, are nearly always a huge letdown – and don’t talk to me about people who call themselves chefs. 

The best meal I ever had was on the border of Czechoslovakia while waiting for a visa. I had waited a long time and finally the border guards kindled up a fire and started roasting things that glimmered in the darkness. They turned out to be medium-sized birds with breast flesh that fell easily away from the bone in burnished shields, crusted slightly with a mixture of chestnuts.

On the side was a glaucous mass of something, I was not sure what. Turned out to be turnip mixed with roasted quince. I had a hard time understanding the word, ‘no not apple, bigger, yellow…’ We scratched our heads and then one of them ran out and came back with a quince. The whole meal had been culled from within a few meters. It was worth not having a visa.

Yep I have eaten a lot of weird things, something that proclaimed in Chinese to be snake’s bum (I didn’t know they had bums), a pig that still wore its postmortem expression and, in a bathing hut in Sidi Bashir, the yellow tongues of purple anemones cooked in butter, the taste mingling with the smell of the sea.

Once in Cairo in a traffic jam, a taxi drew up beside us and handed over a parcel. It was a calf’s head still warm with congealed blood and cooked in black butter. Fierce, I tell you. I eat the eyes, tossed to me in the back seat.

My taste buds start palpitating when I think of all the great unexpected meals I have eaten right here in Cape Town.

The Irma Stern Museum chap Christopher Peter’s weighty clunk of thickly cut super fat lamb chops always served in an enamel bowl are recklessly agreeable, served with nothing but a shoot-your-eyes-out pud like spanspek ice cream.

My friend architect Philip Briel always says, “I’ll knock up something”, and  emerges with a thin invalidy consommé made from prawn shells with a spiced aubergine salad to follow. A big blob of bone like the top of a knobkerrie (is it a knuckle?) had been somehow rendered and reduced to slippers of soft secret flesh that you often find sheltering around bones.

I have always loved chaud-froid sauces, especially aspic. One night Briel made a thickened jelly broth out of fish heads with vinegar, parsley and small onions and set it with some fish remains and vegetables mixed with parsley, ginger and more small onions. The food shone brightly like jewels under glass.

The simpler the better.

A couple of eggs collected yourself from the coop with my friend Andrew Wittingdale, now dead, still warm and then poached into a sort of bedizened splotch on thick slices of bread, not toast, that absorb the runniness. Soft, slightly translucent, yet firm enough not to give you the squibbles. Makes me think of Cherry-Garrard, the explorer who walked all the way to the South Pole holding a penguin egg in each hand.

The egg is icon.

A real Capey but originally from Paris, brocanteur Gilles de Moyencourt is crafty, using staples from the local supermarket. A slipper of springbok as sleek as a doe, served with scalloped buttresses of wild fig preserve. He chucks a load of green peppercorns on a piece of pork loin and serves with medallions of celeriac.

There’s photographer Jac de Villiers’ famous stinging nettle soup with its bats squeak of fugitive tastes that starts off slightly hostile but emerges as a gumptious palliative. Everything he cooks takes on the nature of surprise, and like okra (a favourite) is never wholly benign.

Clarke’s bookshop owner Henrietta Dax’ fish pie, a slipstream of butter and real cream and ordinary old hake. The secret is to keep it bland and the chunks of fish still springy, cooking fish in small bits is the way to not overcook, needs just a toss. Blandness is its marker for those (I am one) who love a bit of hospital tray. There are days when only mashed potato will do the trick.

Cheryl Cowley, owner of Nice ice cream can’t cook a bad meal. She doesn’t belong to the “I’ll just knock up something” tribe but approaches food with aesthetics and amorousness as one might a stranger or a lover. Her ricotta and spinach cake topped with purple basil and her chicken stuffed with finely chopped feta and fresh herbs, the crumbled remains mixed with parmesan and sprinkled over the top, are seductive.

Her star turn is chimichurri sauce, audacious and daring, a mixture of fifty fresh herbs and lots of what tastes like pasture greenery.

Kobus van der Merwe’s ricotta and dune spinach pasta, from the days before the fame. (Photo: Jac de Villiers)

And then in some unsuspecting place you find that perfect taste – potter Hylton Nel’s cottage pie, the last of the leg of lamb home-minced with a rough texture, topped with a mixture of eggplant and mascarpone; artist Beezy Bailey’s crumbled Amaretti in butternut soup; Andrew Wittingdale’s drunken chicken; Kobus van der Merwe’s (now famous for Wolfgat but once unknown) unique witchery of shoreline pickings of samphire, dune spinach and ricotta that I first tasted 10 years ago sitting in the courtyard of his parents’ corner shop in Paternoster.

Food is a form of sorcery and a lot of brilliant cooks are simply witches in aprons. DM/TGIFood