A taste of home - TimesLIVE

Porridge is the smell that takes Nokx Majozi home. Not truffles, browned butter, jus reduced for three days or any of the other things a chef who’s spent years in some of London’s best kitchens might be expected to wax lyrical about. But it’s often the simple things in life, like porridge, that give us the most joy.

“The smell always reminds me of my grandma in the morning,” she says. “Every day there was porridge — whether it was sorghum porridge, amabele or maize meal porridge.”

Then come the other edible memories: the smoke of a braai, corn, dumplings, steamed bread, oxtail. Even polenta, though not essentially South African but close enough, can transport her back to pap and childhood.

Maybe it’s the strange magic of leaving home that makes the ordinary feel precious when you’re far enough away from it. The food you barely noticed as a child — simply just food — suddenly acquires provenance. Pap becomes a subject worthy of explanation, chakalaka needs translating, and a diner in London gets excited about the thing you ate on a Tuesday night at home without thinking about its cultural significance at all.

“We have a lot of cultures and a lot of dishes. I wanted the book to tell that story.”

Majozi had to travel from KwaZulu-Natal to Florida and eventually London before she understood the value of what had been served up on the family table her whole life. “Growing up, food was always there,” she says. “Traditional food was normal food — we ate it every day. As South Africans we tend to want to try other cuisines — Italian, Mediterranean — which is great, but when I started travelling, people wanted to know about my South African food.”

This is an irony familiar to South Africans. We’re often susceptible to the idea that something becomes sophisticated in proportion to the distance it’s travelled to reach us. Majozi went the other way.

Born in Durban and raised near Richards Bay, she learnt to cook watching her parents, and studied hospitality at Durban University of Technology at a time when cooking professionally wasn’t regarded as an obvious career choice.

Then she landed an extraordinary early opportunity: travelling to Florida to represent South African cuisine at Walt Disney World. Next stop was London and 11 years at Rosewood London hotel, where she became head pie maker and senior chef at Holborn Dining Room. She was named one of restaurant critic Jay Rayner’s rising stars in 2022 and has now joined the team at Fallow, a restaurant in St James, London, which serves modern British cuisine, with an emphasis on sustainable cooking. Majozi is the chef in residence and her speciality is pastry.

What makes Majozi interesting is the notion that heritage must be front and centre and shouldn’t be kept behind glass. She’s spent more than 20 years abroad, mastering the European culinary canon, and inevitably her two worlds, past and present, collided.

Take her Wellington, a British dish, to which Majozi added biltong. The idea: if the dish needs that salty, smoky intensity, why not use the ingredient that provides it in the culinary language she knows best? “I have both cultures,” she says, “so I can come up with something where people say, ‘I know this, but I didn’t know I could do this’. You educate people, but at the same time you stay traditional and respect the heritage.”

This is rather different from the fashionable restaurant business of “elevating” indigenous food — a word that, if you think about it for longer than three seconds, contains a fairly insulting assumption about where it was sitting to begin with. Majozi rejects that. “It’s not about elevating it,” she says. “I take it as it is. If I try to change it, sometimes you lose the authenticity.”

Her debut book, The South African Cookbook, takes that confidence and runs with it. There are 90 recipes, among them lamb bunny chow, Cape Malay chicken curry, samp and beans, Durban curried mussels, sweetcorn bread, pumpkin fritters and melktert. Some are family recipes, others Majozi’s interpretations, but collectively they attempt the almost impossible task of answering a deceptively simple question: what is South African food?

Before writing it, she travelled around South Africa, reacquainting herself with dishes and watching what visiting friends responded to. She deliberately drew from indigenous, Indian, Cape Malay, Dutch and British traditions. “I wanted people to understand that, as a Rainbow Nation, this is how diverse we are,” she says. “We have a lot of cultures and a lot of dishes. I wanted the book to tell that story.”

And for all that breadth, Majozi’s own tastes remain pretty uncomplicated. Her pantry, wherever she is in the world, contains samp or maize meal and curry powder. Asked what she’d cook to introduce a foreign friend to South Africa, she doesn’t produce some elaborate chefly construction involving foam and tweezers.

Pap, chakalaka and grilled meat. Or Seven Colours — the Sunday lunch that puts it all on one plate. It typically features a vibrant spread of rice, roast meat and an array of colourful vegetable sides like butternut squash, beetroot, beans and sweet potato.

Her own discovery on a recent trip home was ox tongue, eaten at chef Moses Moloi’s Gigi restaurant in Midrand. She loved it, asked him how he cooked it and went home to make it herself. The teacher became the student; the expatriate came home and found something new in the old country.

We talk about heritage as though it’s something handed to us complete, with strict instructions not to mess with it. But food has never adhered to those kinds of rules. It travels, borrows and adapts. It gets wrapped in pastry filled with biltong. But the core flavours stay true.

Majozi has spent two decades taking South Africa out into the world. Now, with The South African Cookbook, she’s gathered our many different kitchens between two covers and filled the space in between them with the smell of her grandmother’s porridge.

There’s nothing tastier than a bowl of beans simply simmered in stock and seasoned with salt and pepper, but currying them takes them to a whole new level. This dish is the ultimate comfort food for me on colder days. When we saw that the weather was going to be bad, my brother would start the beans soaking overnight and then make this curry the next day. The soft, tender sugar beans soak up all the warmth and spice of the curry, filling the whole house with a delicious fragrance while it simmers away.

Bobotie is one of those dishes that instantly brings back memories of my time spent in Cape Town. I love the comforting layers of curried minced meat topped with that creamy, golden custard-like layer. The sweet and savoury flavour combination, paired with the spices of South Africa, makes it a dish that never fails to please. It’s one of those polarising dishes that people either love or simply don’t quite get. I often serve it with yellow rice, sambals and sometimes a little Mrs Ball’s Chutney on the side, making this an affordable and delicious dish to have during the week or on a lazy weekend.

Peppermint Crisp Tart. (Yuki Sugiura) Peppermint Crisp Tart

The Peppermint Crisp Tart is one of my all-time favourite South African desserts. It’s so easy to make and it’s always a hit. The layers of biscuits, caramel and whipped cream come together in perfect harmony, and then there’s that signature minty crunch from the grated Peppermint Crisp chocolate. This no-bake dessert is light, refreshing and oh-so delicious. It’s a classic in my house, and I’m sure it will become a regular in yours too.