Kingdom of fine herbs

Imagine there was a whole kingdom of herbs quite different from those we know and have used all our lives in our cooking – the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme that have flavoured almost everything we’ve eaten in our lives. And all these herbs, if we’ve lived on the South African soil, have been at our feet, their fragrances perfuming the air, whenever we’ve walked in the Cape Floral Kingdom. But some of them occur far away from that kingdom; throughout the Karoo.

This came home to me this week when I made a rub. A different kind of rub. A rub of fynbos herbs. I concocted a bit of this and a bit of that, like witches around the cauldron. But no adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting in this cauldron; nor lizard’s leg, nor owlet’s wing. In my miniature cauldron (a ramekin, actually) went kankerbos and honeybush, buchu and renosterbos; rooibos and Cape Mountain Sage, and a few grindings of black pepper of the old-fashioned sort, because it needed that.

Once I’d packed the rub onto a pork sirloin roast, I leaned in to smell it.

And it smelt of the veld.

It had the aromas of the vast, endless plains of Klein Karoo and Camdeboo, and it conjured windmill and acacia, cattle lolling and sheep grazing.

Then, after sitting uncovered in the fridge for several hours, it went into the pan, in olive oil, for browning. The fragrances immediately intensified and enriched, as if caramel had been added to the wild herbs. It was a magical moment.

I’ve cooked a few other dishes with fynbos herbs lately. I used nutmeg pelargonium and Cape Mountain Sage to flavour a potato bake. I made fynbos butter for a roast chicken, using honeybush and snowbush (kapokbos); these two lovely wild herbs also went into the stuffing and the glaze, along with prickly pear syrup, nagmaalwyn and garlic powder. And I used kapokbos, both the dried herb and the salt, in a Wagyu biltong pâté.

The fynbos herbs and salts come from SouthAfricanFynbos.com who are based in Wellington in the Western Cape where they offer the Cape Town Fynbos Experience; guided tastings in what, with overly floral language,  they call a “sensory immersion” that “takes you on a flavour trail beyond the constraints of time to a mixology of veld and flower, awakening the inner explorer”. Okay. Wading past all that, what we have is 11 herbs, from buchu, rhino bush (renosterbos), snowbush (kapokbos/wild rosemary) to cancer bush (kankerbos), rooibos, honeybush, silver bush and Cape Mountain Sage, and a trio of pelargonium herbs: mint, rose, and nutmeg.

Now, we can’t chuck all of those at one dish; like conventional herbs, some can work in combination and others are best used alone. It makes sense to pair them by note or style; by “note” I mean in the way that perfumiers identify “notes” in a fragrance. 

Rooibos. (Image supplied)

Kapokbos (snowbush). (Image suppled)