Taste testing the team: Big challenges for small hands

Never mind the recipe, Parmesan is Parmesan. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

By Marie-Lais Emond

7 May 2021

The teenage author of a new cookery book is at boarding school in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. The not-quite-teen testers of his recipes are in their mother’s kitchen, after day school, in Jozi.

Muako Maepe is a teen author who normally lives in Jozi with his own mother, Khanyisa Malabi. Khanyisa has also written one of my favourite South African food books, Legacy of Living and Sparkles of Taste, from which I’ve learned to execute some exciting African fine dining recipes, including a favourite braised goat’s neck dish with pumpkin dombolo. It’s the reason I’m always trying to find goat meat. But this is about the book by her son, Muako.

We are hoping he can spend some time online with us, on screen or at least on the phone, with the not-quite-teens in Jozi this afternoon.

Jess and Charlie Caudle are the not-quite-teens, weighing and measuring ingredients fairly neatly I reckon for cooks of 10 and 12 years old in the family kitchen.

I say this because Danielle Postma, their mother, has another kitchen on the premises. She is a South African chef who worked in London with Ottolenghi and Tamimi in Knightsbridge, London after she qualified at Leith’s there.

She returned to South Africa with her jazz musician husband, Mike Caudle, and they opened Moema’s restaurant in Jozi’s Parktown North, with Ottolenghi as an investor. Danielle and her chefs run it as a catering business on the premises now that Moema’s the restaurant is closed.

Danielle, the mother of these not-quite-teens wafts into the kitchen, wearing an airy cranberry coloured tunic and offers me cranberry tea, while I try to talk to the kids who are concentrating almost single-mindedly on their recipes. They aren’t frowning though.

I’ve often called Danielle the pâte sucrée queen but of course she’s much more than the creator of exquisite confections that had so many people clonking their noses on the windows of Moema’s restaurant as they peered at the displays. I wonder how much has rubbed off on her tweeny children.

Muako wrote his book for other teens, he being 15 and, as we see, even produced the cookbook himself, about the food he likes and likes to make and knows other teens like. He called it Tell Me What You Eat and I’ll Tell You Who You Are, probably the best-known quotation from gastronome Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste.

Walking around the kitchen with my teacup I feel rather senior since I know the teen and the tweens’ mothers. Muako’s mom is really a hotshot businesswoman but I know the food writing side of her.

Charlie has to go to rugby practice so he started making Muako’s Pasta di Pomodoro from the Home Brew Food section of the cookbook, a bit before I arrived. So far he’s fried the garlic and it smells just right. He’s just added fresh and tinned tomatoes. He’s also adding a chicken stock cube to them because it was listed in the ingredients but isn’t sure. We reckon it’s a good idea.

Charlie started Muako’s Pasta di Pomodoro from the Home Brew Food section of the book. Danielle Postma is in the background. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

Meantime, Jess is being super-particular about her ingredients and the muffin tray for her Chocolate and Vanilla Marble Muffins from the Chocolate Food section of Muako’s book. She’s about to whisk the eggs and sugar.

Muako calls in to us by phone from his boarding school. We can’t get an onscreen connection but maybe that’s just as well because everything is speeding up in this kitchen. He tells Charlie that Pasta di Pomodoro is his own favourite dish and our teen chef beams.

“It’s really nice. I really like it. It’s going well,” he tells the author.

Muako also chats to Jess though I can’t hear what he’s saying. She’s riveted to the spot, her eyes enormously wide, hardly able even to whisper any words in return. I am astonished. She seemed so articulate. When she hands the phone back I see she’s blushing. I get it now. Senior boy (and author) actually talks to a 10-year-old girl. Unbelievable. I remember those days.

Muako Maepe at boarding school while the Jozi day school tweens cook from his book. (Photo: Annake Müller Publishing)

Recovered, she stands on tiptoe to pour into the mix oil, self-raising flour, baking powder (I guess Muako doesn’t take chances) and vanilla essence. There’s milk and buttermilk to follow so there’s certainly no doubt about the muffins rising now. Jess is pleased about that.

I notice they’ve ignored the injunction in the book to wear aprons or play music. There is some music coming in from somewhere distant but the teens are both barefoot and apron free. Jess has flour on her wonderful bee T-shirt.

Charlie, cool and spotlessly confident with a wooden spoon in his hand, is getting the cream ready to add to the sauce. Oh, but he reckons he’ll get the pasta going first so the water’s on the boil.

“I’ve cooked this before. Not this exact one though.” He sniffs the sauce appreciatively and so do I, like a Bisto kid.

Jess, meanwhile, has combined her two batters and poured them into the muffin tins. She gets an extra tin ready because this amount will probably make 24. Possibly she had been planning for 12.

“He doesn’t put papers into the pan,” she exclaims, checking the recipe. In it Muako mentions using cooking spray. Then she loses herself in swirling the extra cocoa batter into each muffin space with a skewer. I think she’s ensuring that the marbling will indeed be that, even though Danielle says it will happen anyway. She’s been racing around the kitchen at Masterchef speed till now, a blur holding a bowl.

Up till now Jess has been racing round the kitchen at Masterchef speed. Time out to check her choc-vanilla marble muffins. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

The pasta’s ready and I note that Charlie keeps some of the pasta water aside. He mentions it to Danielle. It’s in the recipe but he’s saying he does it “usually”. He casually puts the dish together, adding the lemon and olive oil.

We taste it as he walks off to the pantry. I think it needs salt. He doesn’t. He’s returned with a microplane and some cheese. Danielle says it’s not in the recipe.

“I love my Parmesan,” he says to me, weighing off a small bit.

Never mind the recipe, Parmesan is Parmesan. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

Jess neatly spoons more batter into the new pan, cleaning the spoon as she goes. Danielle says Jess has made a red velvet cake before. I ask whether she used red colouring or beetroot or relied on the acid from buttermilk and cocoa. “Beetroot,” Jess answers very seriously. Danielle tells me that she as Moema’s prefers the cocoa route.

She helps Jess get her marble muffins into the warmed oven, though she admits the oven has its own idiosyncrasy that means it won’t be quite as in the recipe.

Jess has time to sample the pasta. A dramatic: “Mmm”.

She tidies up and Mike calls Charlie to get ready for rugby. Danielle and I have our cranberry tea and she remarks what fun the children had choosing and rechoosing their recipes from Muako’s book. At first, Charlie had wanted to make The Perfect Bacon-and-egg Toast from the Fast Food section but changed his mind.

I ask Jess if there’s anything she found difficult about the recipe. She says she didn’t but adds, “He needs to explain that the mixing bowl must be very large. I couldn’t get all the flour into the mixer’s bowl,” she said like a professional critic. She didn’t say anything about extra muffin pans.

Charlie appears at the same time as the Chocolate and Vanilla Marble Muffins emerge from the idiosyncratic oven. Charlie’s in rugby togs with a takeaway box to stuff with muffins. Without waiting for any cooling, everyone, including me, has a hot muffin.

Despite the still-warmth, I am enchanted by the good-and-sticky texture and comforting aroma particularly.

Charlie says Muako’s pasta recipe in the book was really easy to make and he likes it because it is good and filling. He says he chose it because he needs to carbo-load for rugby.

Jess says she doesn’t really like icing on cakes or cupcakes and that hers are “pretty and practical”. She likes the marbling effect and taste but also, even though we’ve gobbled up quite a few, “It makes lots so I can give them to people as presents.”

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Muako Maepe, I think that, after these two teen food trialists have said what they eat, you might say that they are a hungry junior rugby player and a lovely giver of gifts. DM/TGIFood

Muako Maepe’s cookbook for teens is available from Annake Müller Publishing, 082 780 4899, [email protected]

The writer supports Nosh Food Rescue, an NGO that helps Jozi feeding schemes with food “rescued” from the food chain. Please support them here.

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