A touch of the Cape for Sunday brunch

Fresh fruit platter and iced rooibos tea with blueberries, strawberries, mint and lemon

MY FRIEND Retief is a sophisticated Afrikaner with a glint in his eye who has seen most of the world and eaten in fine restaurants in most countries you could name. But he was brought up on a farm and the farm has never left him. Finally he found a way to cut the stultifying yoke of the corporate world, buy a little farm near Riviersonderend and raise plums. I’ve never seen him look happier.

I wasn’t thinking of what they farmed when I planned a Sunday brunch for their visit last weekend, so when it dawned on me that I had bought supermarket plums for a breakfast for a plum farmer, I quickly hid them in the crisper, where they linger still, nonplussed.

The inspiration for this brunch was the many wonderful breakfast spreads you find in hotels and guest lodges. In the past few months, for instance, we’ve enjoyed breakfast buffets at Mont Rochelle in Franschhoek, and at the Arniston Hotel. Both were excellent, but one thing I find about such spreads is that nothing much really marries with everything else. There might be slivers of ham, smoked salmon, other cold meats, a selection of cheeses, bowls of stewed fruit alongside bowls of fresh fruit, cereals and yoghurts, and then the range of hot foods such as bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms, tomato, hash browns, flapjacks, toast, preserves…

OK, most of us won’t go back to our tables with a plate of smoked salmon, bacon, stewed fruit and cheddar, but my point is that there might be ways to make more sense of it all. So I thought about it all and came up with a four-course menu for a Sunday bru

Black mushrooms with scrambled farm eggs, toasted flapjacks topped with bacon and Camembert, grilled, served with sauvignon blanc jam

nch, based on some of the things you tend to find on such breakfast spreads.

First up was an easy-peasy fruit platter. There’s some lovely fruit out there right now. Pineapples, sweetmelon, watermelon, strawberries, plums (scratch that), nectarines, cling peaches. Choose any of the above and cut them into slivers, arrange them prettily on a platter and serve with a refreshing glass of iced rooibos tea. For this, I made rooibos tea the night before and refrigerated it, then in the morning poured it into a glass jug with blueberries, halved strawberries, slices of lemon and sprigs of mint. Do this first thing in the morning and refrigerate it, to give the juices and herbs time to infuse the tea.

Slightly heartier was smoked salmon mousse served with toasted garlic ciabatta, and garlic-chilli prawns (I cheated – they’re ready-cooked from Woolies). For the mousse I bought hot smoked salmon (smoked whole pieces, which I flaked, rather than thin slivers) and blended them with lemon juice, black pepper and creme fraiche, adding a tablespoonful of mustard. To lighten the texture, you can whip up some cream separately and fold it in. Don’t salt it – it’s salty enough already.

I smothered large black mushrooms in olive oil and grilled them in the oven until soft (ish), then scrambled in butter the farm eggs Retief and Ann had brought us. What a pleasure to cook eggs that had been laid that morning, all sunshiny yellow rather than the opaque, vague hue of lesser eggs.

But best of all was the recipe I invented as the “main” breakfast course. OK, there’s a tad more cheating: I bought ready-made flapjacks from Woolies*, and toasted them in the pop-up. Then I grilled some back bacon, and folded two pieces of the bacon on each flapjack. I topped each of these with two slivers of Camembert, and grilled them until the cheese turned lightly golden.

Finishing this off was a little treasure I bought the other day at the deli at Spier in the Stellenbosch winelands – sauvignon blanc jam. A spoonful on top of each turned flapjacks with bacon and Camembert into a new dish I hope to repeat many times.

It has a touch of the Cape about it thanks to the sauvignon blanc jam, and reminded me of those fabulously filling meals to be enjoyed on the West Coast, where plates are piled high with chops and seafood and great wads of bread with peach jam, like a hotel buffet on steroids. But that’s another column.

* Note to foreign visitors: ‘Woolies’ is Woolworths, but nothing to do with the recently liquidated British chain of drab stores (which has closed on the High Street but moved online). Woolies in South Africa is more like Marks & Spencer, but better, posher, after some years of working hard at pushing the retail boundaries. Think of it as M&S with a soupcon of Waitrose.

First published in Weekend Argus The Good Weekend, November 2009