Viljoen - 66 square feet: a delicious life

Published in 2013 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang An imprint of ABRAMS

Text copyright 2013 Marie Viljoen
Photographs copyright 2013 Marie Viljoen, except images on , copyright 2013 Vincent Mounier

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ISBN: 978-1-61769-050-1

Editor: Dervla Kelly
Designer: Anna Christian
Production Manager: Tina Cameron

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TO MY MOTHER, MAUREEN VILJOEN

FOR FEEDING ME, AND FOR TEACHING ME THE NAMES OF FLOWERS

I have always looked at what is growing at my feet to know where and when I am in the world. And then I have tried to eat it.

In New York, a city more famous for its concrete and culture than for its plants, I see green. I find wild violets and edible knotweed shoots in Central Parks Ramble in April and notice the English roses on a Brooklyn fence in May as a cab rushes by. I take note of rhubarb and ramps arriving at farmers markets. In June I pick ripe serviceberries beside the Hudson and East rivers. On the street I photograph cherry tomatoes hanging from a fire escape in August. I water my own heirloom tomatoes on the roof of our apartment. I pick meadow mushrooms and eat them on toast in September, and in October there are maitake in Green-Wood Cemetery.

For me, New York City is an unfolding, edible calendar.

This fabled place is one whose contradictions of wealth and poverty, ostentation and decay, visible congestion and personal isolation, lure of success and specter of failure, conspire to chew a person up and spit her out if a way is not found to make peace with them.

Our tiny urban lullwater, a very small terrace fringed with green above the never-resting street, is where I am able to press pause and shut out the noise.

I was born very far from New York in a small city called Bloemfontein in a kidney-shaped province called the Free State in the middle of South Africa. Bloemfontein means flower fountain. I grew up in a high-walled garden in placid suburbia in a city dotted with low, grassy hills called koppies.

In Bloemfontein I was given a narrow strip of earth behind the house, beside the enclosures and cages where my brothers kept songbirds, quails, and ducks, and where we shared guinea pigs and rabbits. I sowed my first seeds thereradishes. I planted muscari, sweet peas, and ixias. My mothers herb and vegetable gardens grew nearby and later expanded to an acquired piece of land next door, where she made a terraced vegetable garden. Fruit grew all over the garden: plums, apricots, peaches, figs, gooseberries, and youngberries. Picking fresh chervil or a ripe plum, collecting green beans or a bunch of flowers, was a way of life, and exciting. Food and flowers were living things, from real places and plants.

My childhood birthday in October coincided with the first blooming of the roses in my mothers rose garden, and I still associate that day with the image of a perfectly round and delicate pink glass vase of roses on my birthday table, filled with fragrant bloomsPeace, Pappa Meilland, Double Delightsurrounded by frosted cupcakes, wobbling jellies, and plates of cookies, baked for a sit-down birthday feast.

I grew up with good food. My mother is still the best cook I know, and she makes each meal a gastronomic experience. I remember her teaching me to stir bchamel in that kitchen, for cheese sauce to pour over cauliflower or broccoli, and how I was allowed to lick the saucy wooden spoon where pepper and salt had accumulated near the handle. I made the gravy for our every-other-Sunday roastbeef, lamb, or porkstirring up the pan juices, adding wine and cream, and a brown powder from a box called Bisto (it was later banished). On the Sundays in between we braaied (barbecued), my father turning lamb chops and boerewors (sausages) over the coals beside the swimming pool.

When I was twelve, my father decided hed outgrown his professional legal environment, and our family moved to Cape Town so he could pursue his career at the Cape Town Bar. For my mother, this was a return, at last, to the city where she had spent a happy childhood, playing under pine trees and pretending to be Christopher Robin. In Cape Town, a foreign and dramatic landscape replaced the grasslands and hills and corn fields of the Free State. Mountains serrated with vineyards and covered in indigenous fynbos loomed above strings of gleaming white and rocky beaches.

As a fourteen-year-old in Cape Town, in a new garden with no walls and a spectacular view of Table Mountains green eastern flank, I laid out my mothers first formal herb garden and I began to immerse myself in books about edible plants, herbs, and wildflowers.

The first serious cooking I attempted was in Cape Town, when I was fourteen. My mother had caught chicken pox from me and was very ill. From her bed, for two weeks, she dictated the evening meals to me. It was a crash course in good cooking. The first dish I ever cooked was braised short ribs with juniper berries and bay leaves. The next was roast chicken.

Every September, until I left South Africa, we held a big garden party called the Spring Breakfast. My mother, assisted by Tipsy Titoti, our wonderful housekeeper, would cook for days to stock a massive buffet table with potted prawns, terrines and pts with homemade bread, several soups, poached salmon trout, mounds of asparagus spears, fluffy savory cheesecakes, a huge pot of lamb-with-a-spoon, cooked for a day, chocolate tarts, and heaps of strawberries. I contributed desserts and superfluous handmade chocolate truffles and made-from-scratch puff pastry pigs ears. Orange juice and sparkling wine flowed in a river of Bucks Fizz, and pink umbrellas dotted the garden like giant flowers, in among the blossoming crab apples, jewel-like