click for recipes
He said:
My name is Eric Peverelli. I have
always been keen on cooking. As a child I was allowed to help my Mom
and Grandmother when they were cooking and baking. My mother and grandparents
came from Switzerland. I grew up in a house where the cooking was
definitely more continental. We often ate scnitzel and German style
smoke sausages, red cabbage and made wahe (a kind of tart with an
egg and cream topping over onions or fruit and then baked) etc. We
just restored a recipe book that came with my grandmother from in
Switzerland in 1922.
In my younger days I used to make
a mean chocolate cake. At the age of 22 I was transferred some 1500
kilometres away from Cape Town to Johannesburg. I moved into my own
apartment and had to cook for myself. I was never too keen on fast
foods and rather enjoyed making my own meals in the evenings.
She
said:
My name is Marieta Peverelli.
I grew up on a farm on the West Coast of South Africa. I have been
in a Clerical field all my life. About 30 years ago I moved to Cape
Town, at the very point of South Africa. I have stayed in the same
neighbourhood against Table Mountain ever since. Two years after I
arrived in Cape Town I met Eric and 21 years ago we got married. Since
then we spent many happy hours together in the kitchen. My mother
loves baking but seldom allowed me as a child much time in the kitchen
because I would make a mess. (Little did she know about the times
I made toffee (and believe it or not - put cold water into the pot
- what a mess to clean!) while she was visiting our neighbours on
the farm). Nonetheless, once I moved into my own apartment, my next
door neighbour (could have been my grandmother) got me hooked on baking
at first and then we started on cooking. She supplied me with some
of her special recipes. This was the beginning for me.
He
said:
In Cape Town the cooking is very
mixed. We have large Italian, German, Portuguese and Malay communities.
The Malay cooking is high on the popularity list because their forefathers
came with the Settlers and Hugenots to South Africa in the late 1600.
Most of them eat Halaal, which just means that the animals have to
be slaughtered in a special way according to their religion. She work
with two girls and the dishes they bring for us to taste, is to dream
of! They would often bring her the recipes of their traditional dishes
and sometimes we get some special Masala and curry powders and they
give us advice about the combinations of masalas and curries that
we should use to get the best results. One thing that we only learned
recently is that you always add a stick or two of cinnamon to a curry
to get some sweetness in the dish.
She
said:
Eric's biggest pride, after his
family, is probably his wine cellar. We had a room specially built
for this and he has in excess of 1000 bottles of wine there. Most
is from South Africa, but we do get the occasional gift of Portuguese
and Italian wine too. The majority of the wines are reds such as Cabernet
Sauvignon, Bordeaux Blends, Pinotage as well as a variety of Ports
and Sherries. The whites vary from Chardonnay to Special Late Harvest.
There are some sweet wines fortified such as Muscadel, Jeripico and
Hanepoot. As far as other specials are concerned we have about 50
liqueurs and that brings us to another of our specialities making
our liqueurs. The one that we love to make is Lemoncello which is
an Italian Lemon Liqueur. This is fabulous on crushed ice.
Dishes we are regularly making
are our own pesto (Eric is growing his own basil) and olive tapanade
(to go with the bread). Eric likes strong curries and chilli dishes
and makes a mean chilli relish. "Rootie and curry" is a
traditional Malay dish and one of his favourites. The curry is quite
strong one but the sauce must not be too thin. Then you make a dough
(something like puff pastry but a little heavier) which you roll out
in circles and fry in little oil in a frying pan. The curry gets dished
into this "pancake" and then rolled up.
They
said together:
We do not eat out too often but
when we do and we enjoy the dish; we would make notes (mental) and
go home to start one of our favourite hobbies. This is to try and
copy the recipe for that dish. Most of the time we get it spot on
within two tries.
We would like to one day book
ourselves into one of those Italian Cooking Schools in Tuscany and
do a cooking course while enjoying the real Italian atmosphere.
©
