Nibbling at nostalgia

Andrea Burgener’s cookbook Lampedusa Pie is a feast for the senses

Walking into Joburg chef Andrea Burgener’s Melville restaurant,
The Leopard, is a little bit like stumbling into any of the beautiful pages in her newly released cookbook Lampedusa Pie. The charmingly mismatched old furniture and paintings in the restaurant mimic the playfully retro style in which her dishes have been styled for the cookbook. Paintings readily flow between her house and her restaurant, as needed, and most of the trays, cups and quaint knick-knacks used as props in the book’s photographs had been found by photographer Theana Breugem in Andrea’s home.

It’s quirky and it’s one hundred per cent Andrea, who quickly says she has always found it hard to stick to one specific style or genre. She’s a self-confessed ‘magpie chef’, drawing inspiration from old and new recipes, the city she lives in, literature and art to inform the dishes she creates. She finds it impossible to stick to one particular style of cooking, and she refuses to be boxed in. But there is one common ingredient flavouring the pages of Lampedusa Pie and that’s nostalgia.

“I wanted the book to feel slightly dated because so many of the recipes were old recipes,” she says over a welcome cup of coffee before the dinner shift starts to gain momentum. “I love the eclecticism of all of the different plates and fabrics I have at home; it somehow just felt right to do it that way.”

Andrea’s the first to admit that Lampedusa Pie is a tricky cookbook to define, and unless you’re familiar with a certain macaroni and chicken pie, described in delicious detail in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s historical classic The Leopard, the title isn’t going to give you much guidance either.

But there’s an undeniable sense of familiarity in many of her dishes and few South Africans would be able to resist recipes like pumpkin fritters, roast chicken with bread sauce, mielie bread and ‘best-ever melktert’.

She has a refreshingly laid-back and unpretentious approach to cooking that comes across strongly throughout the book, whether it’s in the little cheats she offers (as a mom to three kids she needs these cheats as much as her readers do), or the tongue-in-cheek promises not to confront her readers with the likes of ‘pickled duck embryos’ and ‘fusion sushi’.

Besides being a treasure trove of wonderful recipes, Lampedusa Pie is beautiful to behold. Dishes are arranged on colourful plates that look delightfully well loved and used, watermelon slices have playful stolen bites in them, and the more indulgent child-like dishes in the Play With Your Food chapter have fun toys and figurines sticking out of them.

The fact that each dish in Andrea’s cookbook looks like a miniature still-life ready to be framed probably has something to do with her Honours degree in fine art and Masters in painting theory and practice. She worked in various restaurants while studying and even dabbled in TV production, but it wasn’t long before her obsession with food overpowered the allure of bright lights and blank canvases.

“I’ve always loved food,” she says. “And ever since I can remember, I’ve always loved the idea of having a restaurant and feeding people in a particular kind of space.”

Chicken baked with Cream, Garlic, Mustard and Thyme

Serves 6 

    8 garlic cloves, roughly crushed

    2 tbs fresh thyme leaves

    8 bay leaves

    4 tbs Dijon mustard

    1 tbs olive oil

    1 heaped tsp salt

    12 skinned chicken thighs and drumsticks

    2 onions, thinly sliced

    100ml white wine or chicken stock

    300ml cream

    1 tsp sugar

Method
Preheat the oven to 190 °C. In a bowl, mix together the garlic, herbs, mustard, olive oil and salt. Rub the mix over the chicken. Add the onions, and lay the chicken and onions in a roasting pan large enough for the chicken to form a single layer. Bake uncovered for 20 minutes. Mix together the wine or stock, cream and sugar, and pour over the chicken. Bake for another 20 minutes, after which time the cream should be golden brown in places.

*Article first published in the June 2013 issue of SA Country Life magazine.

*All photos by Theana Breugem.

*Andrea Burgener’s cookbook Lampedusa Pie is published by Pan Macmillan.