Lunch with a pastry maker, farming as healing, and zinging a pizza back to life

That Napoli Fifteen pizza. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

4 Apr 2025

There’s something ‘at home’ about the food-related meanderings I’ve been doing in KwaZulu-Natal of late. Some of it even came to my Durban home.

In my recent ramblings, the food and recipes, even the places, have been readily accessible to all, from Adam Robinson’s new book, the launch of which I had missed because I was in Poland at the time, to the abundance of Professor Mvuselelo “Mvu” Ngcoya’s mountainside farm in Patheni and on to one of Chef Mark Mattinson’s pizzas from Napoli Fifteen in Hilton – eaten at home.

The Glenwood Bakery, Durban – catching up with a notable cookbook

It’s a Robinson affair. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

As far back in time as we can go, gastronomic value has always taken precedence over nutritional value. This is the “relevant” bit from a 1938 front-of-the-book quote that sets the scene for Adam Robinson’s A Book About Pastries, the launch of which I missed (when travelling in Poland) last November.

But I was lucky to make a little Sunday celebration for the trim team involved in the creation of the book with Robinson. And lucky is as lucky does. A good substitute for the public launch…

Lunch in a chef, baker, pastry maker’s home garden in Durban. His chickens making an appearance every so often, carried from their terraced coop by the younger guests. Said chef doing the cooking.

Adam Robinson’s chickens make an appearance every so often. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

The menu is in no small part inspired by recipes from the book we’re celebrating. So if you have it, you can replicate our lunch party, at least the menu part if not the company, on a Sunday in your garden.

We had Parmesan and anchovy palmiers for snacks: puff pastry, anchovy and freshly grated Parmesan being the ingredients list. “They don’t stay crisp for more than a day. Though I defy you and your friends not to devour them within the hour,” Adam tells us in the book.

Right. They were gone so fast, I didn’t have a chance to personally immortalise them, so the palmiers photo you see is my photo of photographer Roger Jardine’s excellent lighting and sharp-focus palmiers.

Quail and mushrooms in pastry, Adam Robinson’s work. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

The recipe for our quail and mushroom dish that followed is directly from the book. Probably the book’s most complex. Cailles en Sarcophage. (Definitely not a coffin. If you have the book, you’ll get this reference. Otherwise, guess.)

The Cailles en Sarcophage is introduced, page 82 (as the book’s editor, I received a copy as a gift), as a dish from the famous feast at the end of Babette’s Feast. Remember the 1987 Danish Oscar-winning film? No worries about our meal becoming “a sin” of sensual luxury with this little group. Unadulterated sensual luxury luxuriated in, more likely. And isn’t it, truly, a mix of company, conversation and “cuisine” that makes for good times, wherever (and whenever) one eats?

Next from the kitchen and down the stone staircase into our private subtropical oasis came sous-vide chicken breasts with bread dumplings. Think dombolo, as in steamed bread, to quote Robinson. Keep reading to see dombolo in more traditional form at our Bonakude lunch.

Then, let me call it the pièce de résistance: the flourless orange and almond cake. And yes, directly from the pastry book. Just oranges, eggs, flaked almonds, sugar, baking powder.

Thinking back to the dessert now, while writing this and reading the recipe, almost makes me want to bake again. Except to bake, unlike “to cook”, one has to follow a recipe. And why would one when we have the delights of Dough Girl and Glenwood Bakery right here in central Durban where all the cool people live?

Durbs folks will know Adam Robinson as the chef, founder, baker, flavour genius and gastronome behind The Glenwood Bakery and Glenwood Bakery Morningside.

Back to the pastry book’s 1938 quote. Gastronomic, by dictionary definition, relates to “the art and practice of cooking and eating good food”. These two eateries, if anything, are creative culinary spaces that blend the sentiments of the quote. Think of gastronomic and nutritional value: in balance. Seasonal, fresh, no anonymous food. You know the ingredients have been mindfully chosen. Thoughtfully prepared. Flavour first.

All that we ate at our Sunday garden celebration and all that is shared by way of recipes in the pastry book feature on the ever-shifting “bakery” menus.

The earlier Book about Bread and A Book about Pastries (both collaborations between Robinson and Jardine) are available at the two eateries and in bookstores (including our Durban favourite, Ike’s Books).

Connect via the Glenwood Bakery website. Glenwood Bakery on Facebook. On Instagram.

Bonakude, Phatheni

Mvu preps the lablab bean stew and Linda slices steamed bread for lunch. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

Would I like a cappuccino? With milk, frothed, from one of the Nigerian pygmy goats?

A goat milked by – and the milk frothed by – UKZN professor, Mvuselelo “Mvu” Ngcoya, who will make the coffee. Not – yet – from coffee beans grown, harvested and roasted by Mvu and his wife and farming partner, Linda Lazarczyková.

But the coffee trees they had recently planted when I previously visited, a little over a year ago, are thriving. Growing wildly. Like so many things on the mountainside-clinging layerings of variety and abundance they have created as part of their agro-ecological project on what was pretty much a barren rubbish dump before they got permission from the traditional council to clear and farm it in 2019/20. So it is feasible that on my next visit, the coffee will be single-origin from their home-grown beans…

To beat the heat and catch up on this sultry day, after my almost two-hour drive from Durban to Bonakude Farm in Phatheni, a remote village up a winding dirt road a few minutes past the Richmond turnoff and on the road to Ixopo, we sit in comfy chairs on the shaded deck of the home they have built that clings to the top of the cliff overlooking the steep terraced food farm with its tree nursery, worm farm, seed cellar and seedling nursery. Every plant, every shrub, every seed curated and labelled.

The dominant valley sounds are roosters crowing and the laughter and chatter of daughters Halala (8) and Nala (4) and their little friends splashing in a portable kiddie pool we look down on that is rapidly filling via a hosepipe.

“As a kid a lot of the food we ate was coming from the land,” Mvu told me on my last visit. [Read Growing Food, Growing People.]

But things changed. “Why” had become part of his academic research. Turning the tide and reviving traditional knowledge, part of his commitment. “Farming as a way of healing and recreating identity in this traumatised community,” his mission.

Since I was there last, they and four other farmers at Phatheni have earned organic status through PGS South Africa. Their produce, these days, is distributed through Greenheart Organics. And Mvu and Linda have registered Bonakude as a nonprofit.

They have acquired land in Phatheni and are raising funds to build a resource centre as a much-needed community space. [Read The Miracle of Bonakude.] Now a weekly van takes fresh produce to sales stops around the remote village.

“People here deserve quality food. They deserve to eat free-range eggs and organic cabbage, spinach and beans. It shouldn’t be that the rich, who can shop at upscale supermarkets, get the best and the poor get the crumbs,” says Mvu.

Professor Mvu Ngcoya and Linda Lazarczyková and their goats. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

When we chat in the kitchen, Mvu and Linda preparing lunch, they tell me about the perennial crops, the indigenous crops, the crops tolerant of varying climate conditions, that have become their focus. “There’s this beautiful bean here called lablab.” It is the main ingredient in our gently simmering stew.

“You plant it once. Drought and heavy rain, it tolerates both. You can use it for animal feed. Or soil regeneration.”

When I Google, I find this Kew Gardens description: “The high-protein bean you’ve probably never heard of. Packed with nutrients, as a food crop lablab is an extremely versatile plant as the leaves, roots, flowers, pods and beans are all edible. The raw beans contain a toxin, so they must be boiled before eating. The leaves are extremely high in protein and iron, so as well as a fantastic substitute for spinach, they are also often used as fodder for animals.”

We have the lablab stew with a cherry tomato salad, dombolo (steamed bread) and tea steeped from mint, stinging nettles, lavender, honey and lemon. And I commit to returning in a year. Hopefully to try their home-grown coffee beans in my goat’s milk cappie.

Connect via the Bonakude Farm website. Bonakude on Instagram. Bonakude on Facebook. Order Bonakude produce from Greenheart Organics.

Napoli Fifteen, Hilton —

The pizza devoured at home, from Napoli Fifteen in Hilton. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

Absolutely the best kind of house guests. Friends who come to stay, in this case from California. Head on up via the Midlands to Champagne Castle for the weekend to hike. Stop on the way to look for a specific pizza joint.

Next thing you know, you get a message: “The berg hike was super. On our way up, we pulled into Hilton and recalled that you wrote about a pizza restaurant there you really liked. Is it Napoli Fifteen? If so, we can purchase a pizza there and bring it for supper this evening.”

And so it was that one of Chef Mark Mattinson’s pizzas made its way to my Durban table this week. Mattinson, who spends 72 hours prepping each batch of dough, uses locally made soft cow’s milk cheeses and the correct Italian ingredients when needed, collaborates with Kamberg charcutier Franco Esposito, and turns out his as-authentic-as-possible canotto-style pizzas, crispy with puffy, blistered, deliciously charred cornicione.

I am probably, at this point, a rarity, having never ordered a takeout, bring-it-to-me food delivery, which makes it especially great to get such a pizza delivered.

“I suggested The Mood, it being, obviously, our stretched base, a béchamel sauce with thyme and bayleaves, so you get this gorgeous white-sauce base married with Sicilian anchovies, which is the salty pop one needs in the creaminess of the base,” Mattinson tells me when I ask him, after the fact, about the pizza, my California friends having asked him, at my suggestion, that he suggest a pizza choice.

“Where the pizza originated, it was called the Chef’s Side Squeeze. This was essentially what I ate after service, which nobody else ate. That was coppa ham on a Margherita with chilli and garlic, no more, no less. It allowed Franco’s ham to scream fattiness and flavour.

That Napoli Fifteen pizza. (Photo: Wanda Hennig)

“And then I thought, I also adore anchovies and I need salt, so let’s turn it into a white base and let’s throw in the anchovies and let’s throw, on top, the coppa ham. And then marry it again (bigamy?) with the chilli and garlic, my absolute weakness. And it was the most awesome profile.

“I suggested it because I know your profile. I know how you love less is more. But you also like to go wild.”

I tossed a salad. Lightly sprayed the pizza with a mist of water and popped it in the oven at 180°C for four minutes, as recommended by Mattinson, to “zing it back to life”. We twisted the lid on a bottle of white. It was wild. And it was wonderful. We toasted and ate to friendship. DM

Follow Napoli Fifteen on Facebook and on Instagram.

Follow Wanda Hennig on Instagram.

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