SIGN WITH AN E

Today is Freedom Day, 13 years after Nelson Mandela’s election as the first president of a democratic South Africa (make that “democratic”).

Freedom Day means a public holiday, which means not having to be anywhere before you want to be there. With today’s rain, I planned a brunch of homebaked fruit loaf (fig, apple, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg) with goat’s cheese, some crispy smoked bacon from my local butcher, a drizzle of honey and a glass of Gewurtztraminer.

My plan got derailed by an invitation for lunch at Leinster Hall, one of Cape Town’s very own “gentlemen’s” clubs. I have long wondered what it would take me to get an invite to a gentleman’s club, and perhaps it was dressing all in black or perhaps it was being with two well-respected gentlemen (who share a French surname) that did the trick, but I got in, and the treatment was all that I would expect of a gentleman’s club.

We had lunch in the “bistro” section of the establishment which, for you plebeians out there, is a very glorified sports bar. The kind of place, in other words, where ladies’ chairs are pulled out for them and their napkins arranged on laps, all under the watchful eye of the rugby on the corner TV.

The man who waited on us was someone who appeared to have been there for many, many years. He reminded me of the chief waitor at my favourite restaurant as a child, the Lourenco Marques in Mbabane (Swaziland); an old, partially toothless man who was as permanent a fixture as the orange leather seats and the domed lamps, so cheesy and so familiar, like coming home.

My smoked salmon sandwich was good and just the right size for a Freedom Day lunch. The wine was decent and the coffee shit, though probably forgivable. It seems too tall an order to expect everything to be perfect these days. Our expectation of as much may very well be linked to how good we’ve all become to taking things out of context. If you’re at an Italian restaurant, sure, bad coffee would be inexcusable. Same for French, or anything that goes under the name “cafe” or “bistro”. But I think we would do well to remember that not all culinary establishments have made, nor need to make, their mark on the strength of the coffee they serve. Besides, there’s bound to be a Vida close by, if real coffee proves to be essential to end off a good lunch.

It was for me, and now that that’s been sorted, the only thing that remains is to get through the next four hours of having to be where I don’t want to be. Not that it’s a bad place to be (how many people get to moan about sitting in a wine shop for an afternoon?), but only because I could think of other places I’d rather be.

But I will accept these as the requisites to being a gentleman, and look forward to the steak that awaits, because even if I have reverted to being a lady by 8pm tonight, when I close up, I know that there will be a gentleman at my dinner table. The real kind; the one who defies the niceties of language. I’m talking about a gentle man.

It’s another sorry situation when you come home from work looking forward to a bowl of home-popped (that means stove-popped) popcorn, only to find that there are only enough seeds in the packet for a handful (not enough).

Fortunately, however, my mother taught me the good value of freezers, and of baking bread, and my landlord was kind enough to leave me a microwave, so within a few minutes I could obliviate the trauma of no popcorn with a warm, home-baked roll.

Tragedy, you’ll discover if you get to know it well enough, has a lovely sibling, which is good fortune. They follow close on each other, and neither would it be unusual to meet the latter before the former.

But the best way to meet them is to have tragedy first, followed by good fortune. So last night, for instance, I decided to try my hand at a souffle. I have always been very critical of potential inconsistencies or hypocrisies, like the ones that lurk in people who profess to be one thing but have nothing to back it up. And it turns out I have a reputation among various people as a “foodie”, if not (and I say this humbly), someone who “knows” food.

The reputation did not happen by itself. I believe I helped to foster it. There is, after all, the small matter of me having gone to “chef school”. I did not see it out long enough to qualify, but I did the basics, and quit my apprenticeship because I thought I already knew more than they would be able to teach me in 3 years.

But I had never, until yesterday, attempted a souffle. I chose a source who I respect and trust – Elizabeth David – and decided to start with the so-called classic cheese souffle.

You can read the recipe if that sort of thing interests you, but if you do, you can stop short of the ‘perfectly cooked’ at the end, because that is not the end of this story.

Fortunately (here comes the sibling), the man waiting for the souffle in my kitchen was and is a forgiving man, and he not only sat on the floor with me watching the non-rising action through the oven window, but ate heartily of the (cooked) top half when it was on the table. He even tried to convince me that it had, in fact risen, and made it rise just like that.

I think it was the perfect first souffle.

Apropos the option of a pill to eliminate process, the latest “invention” in an already saturated American food market is the caffeinated doughnut, a.k.a the Buzz Donut. Now, instead of having to deal with the arduous task of actually drinking one to two cups of coffee in the morning, you can have it in the form of a deep-fried, transfatty pastry. Yum!

Americanos are something else. They always have to one-up the rest of the world with their appetites. What’s wrong, for instance, with a good old roasted marshmallow? But no, they have to have MORE, so, with the addition of a piece of chocolate and two biscuits (graham crackers, typically), the humble toasted marshmallow becomes a s’more.

S’mores are classic camping treats, I am told, and supermarkets (aren’t they clever) help out by putting marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers conveniently close together during camping seasons. You can also, of course, buy a whole S’more kit, including some heating element if your fire-making skills aren’t up to scratch. But the really wild at heart can just ditch the whole context and get a Hershey’s S’mores. Who wants to go camping anyway?

For those of you who may have been under the impression that a vomitorium was a place where Romans went to vomit in order to continue their gluttony, this is not true.

Turns out a vomitorium is an architectural feature of amphitheatres that allowed spectators to enter and exit quickly (vomere: to discharge).

So, next time that piece of mythology emerges at the dinner table, you know what to do.

I remember, some years ago, being very intrigued by the title of a great film with Phoebe Cates (she of “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” fame). It was called Bodies, Rest & Motion, and the title intrigued me because when I first heard I thought it was called Bodies Rest in Motion, and that didn’t make any sense to me.

I’m now finding that the idea of bodies resting in motion makes a whole lot of sense. The other day I was talking to a good friend about inertia. She told me that the most important quality she looks for in people is a sense of going somewhere. Becoming something. A process (yes, Dr. Phil would call it “growing”).

She’s so right. We should surround ourselves with people who have an energy that actually goes somewhere, and that makes us want to go somewhere too. We don’t look for friends and partners so we can all curl up and die like old dogs together. We look – or we should look – for people who bring out the best in us. And when the best comes out, reciprocity happens all by itself. Not by duty, nor by social obligation, but because you want to give as much as you get.

That’s when you come home to yourself and begin to discover the point of it all. It’s in that movement that you find your rest. Like the last few lanes of a good swim when the muscles are supple and you feel you could keep going for ever, in slow but strong, steady strokes; just keep moving.

It’s an incredible thing to find the point of rest in motion. To realise after years of frowning that you don’t need to anymore. Not all the time, anyway. And to realise that there was a point, after all, to keeping a grandmother’s wedding dress.

There will be a time for tired old dogs to curl up together. But not yet.