Sally Andrew | Food as Magic

My book, RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER is a murder mystery, set in the Klein Karoo, South Africa, and is flavored with the themes of love and recipes. In this article, I explore the latter theme only.

Eating has been going on since the beginning of Life itself. But recipes are a human invention. They are the first act of magic. The origins of alchemy. Combine these special ingredients, follow a certain formula, hold a particular intention and abracadabra, the spell is complete.

My main character, Tannie (Auntie) Maria, is obsessed with food. But her obsession is so convincing that it seems normal. She says that food and love are what matter most in life. She says without food she would be dead. And of course what she says is true.

When people write in with their problems to her agony aunt column in the Klein Karoo Gazette, she does give them advice, but more importantly, she gives them a recipe. When she is chasing down clues in the murder case, she uses food to get people talking. When she is attracted to the handsome detective with the chestnut moustache, she feeds him roast lamb and the best chocolate cake.

Like a spell, a recipe is greater than the sum of its ingredients. Rusks might be made from flour, sugar, butter, muesli etc., but they conjure up companionship, comfort and a listening ear.

Tannie Maria is a brilliant cook. I am not. I’m careless and impatient with a tendency to forget pots on the stove, and an ability to bake things that are so disgusting they have to be destroyed.

So the ‘recipes’ aspect of my book was a big challenge for me. It required intensive research and testing. To start with, I waded through piles of books on traditional South African cooking. I studied, for example, seven different recipes for milk tart. I then creatively combined them into what I was convinced would be the best possible melktert recipe of all time, and employed a professional to bake it for me. It was a disaster. Its taste, texture, size, color, everything, was disgusting. As with many of my previous efforts it was destined for destruction.

However, I was determined to use only recipes that were moan-out-loud or faint-on- the- spot delicious, so I threw the cookbooks under the table, and chased down some of the best cooks in the country and asked them to share their very best recipes with me. These dishes were further perfected by the chef, Martin Mössmer, who also gave me his great-great-grandmother Ouma Alie Visser’s sublime melktert recipe.

That’s another way that recipes are magic. If you bake someone else’s recipe, you bring them right into your kitchen, even if they died generations ago. They return, not as a wispy ghost, but a provider of real food, something you can taste and swallow.

As a writer, I am inspired by the way food engages all the senses. I remember the story of Ernest Shackleton’s men, stranded on Elephantine Island in the Antarctic ocean. Night after night, they huddled under their overturned boat, and ate the same meal of seal blubber. The job of the chef de jour was not just to prepare the dinner but, while they ate, to describe in detail his favorite meal. It was the description of the food that carried the men from their icy surrounds back to their warm and cozy family homes.

Like a good meal, cooked with love, makes a spell to transform the eater, so too as a writer I hope to make magic to transform the reader, to carry them to the kitchen of Tannie Maria in the Klein Karoo.

I’d love to do more than just tell a story. I’d like to give the reader an experience that they can take right into their belly and their bones.

Giveaway

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About Sally Andrew

Sally Andrew lives in a mud-brick house on a nature reserve in the Klein Karoo, South Africa, with her partner, artist Bowen Boshier, and other wildlife (including a giant eland and a secretive leopard). She also spends time in the wilderness of southern Africa and the seaside suburb of Muizenberg. She has a Masters in Adult Education (University of Cape Town).

For some decades she was a social and environmental activist, then the manager of Bowen’s art business, before she settled down to write full-time. This is her first novel. It will be published in at least twelve languages, across five continents.

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About RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER

A bright new talent makes her fiction debut with this first novel in a delicious crime series set in rural South Africa—a flavorful blend of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Goldy Schulz, full of humor, romance, and recipes, and featuring a charming cast of characters

Tannie Maria ("tannie" meaning auntie, the respectful Afrikaans address for a woman older than you) is a middle-aged widow who likes to cook—and eat. She shares her culinary love through her work as a recipe columnist for the local paper, until the Gazette decides its readers are hungrier for advice on matters of the heart than for lunch and dinner ideas.

Tannie Maria doesn't like the change but soon discovers she has a knack—and a passion— for helping people. Of course, a recipe is always part of the remedy she offers. Assisting other people with their problems, Tannie Maria is eventually forced to face her own issues, especially when the troubles of those she helps touch on the pain of her own past—like a woman who contacts her desperate to escape her abusive husband.

When the woman is murdered, Tannie Maria becomes dangerously entwined in the investigation, despite the best efforts of a handsome detective named Kannemeyer, who is determined to keep her safe. Suddenly, this practical, down-to-earth woman is involved in something much more sinister than perfecting her chocolate cake recipe . . .