I’m going to do a bit of a ‘when we’ this week, because I’ve stumbled on a few childhood memories – the first of them at the crack of dawn. My really early morning flight to Johannesburg last week had a wake-up time of 4am, but it was made up for by the roads overflowing with pink and white cosmos flowers as we travelled through The Cradle of Humankind. It’s my favourite time of year in Johannesburg at the moment – apart from October, when the streets are heavily lined with cascading Jacarandas.

Cosmos and Jacaranda flowers always remind me of my childhood in Zimbabwe, where the only chocolate available tasted of soap and had the melting qualities of cardboard, but I do still dream about the country’s award-winning Colcom pork pies and packets of Willards Worcestershire chips.

This is the place where my passion for food was entrenched. I was lucky that my parents loved eating out and often took me along. We loved going to The Bamboo Inn – I don’t think I’ve had better Chinese food since then – and, for special occasions, we’d visit the Meikles Hotel. Not the Copper Kettle downstairs, where we used to have Saturday breakfasts, but the fancy hotel dining rooms, where the guéridon would be wheeled up to your table, with flambéed foods to delight the senses.

One of my favourite places was Guido’s, an Italian restaurant that took no bookings, so we had to queue around the block on many a Friday night, craving Nona’s bowls of homemade pasta and wicker baskets of shiny fruit for dessert.

School holidays were the best, as we got to watch (and eat) piles of flapjacks at the bakery in town, have cannelloni for lunch at The Monomotapa Hotel, and go for tea walks at The Rose Bowl.

Then there were the hours I spent with my nana at Saunders, the very posh department store. She would buy reams of fabric and buttons, and then watch as the cash and invoice would be placed into cylinders and pulleyed up to the ledger department. Afterwards we would have the most delicious lime milkshakes and mince on toast, settled into luxurious upholstered chairs, as fashion models twirled around us.
 
I still talk about the best doughnuts at The Dunkin Doughnut: fat, soft ones that oozed mulberry jam or ice-cold custard. And Wombles Steakhouse Restaurant, that opened just down the road from us in Zimbabwe just before we moved to Joburg. It eventually also moved to Joburg, and still retains the same owners and some staff.

So, back in Cape Town and on the hunt for good food, I eventually got to have breakfast out on Sunday morning at C’est La Vie, up a cobbled road in Kalk Bay. The boys ordered softly boiled free-range eggs with sourdough soldiers to dip, a little more grown up than my egg-and-soldier breakfasts used to be – especially with big doorstopper slices of Lobels white bread, spread with salty dripping!
Flippin’ yummy food memories.

Happy eating!
Abigail