From the forword: 

"The last time I purposefully read a cookbook was in Standard Six. It was a green, soft-cover recipe book compiled by the pupils of Pretoria High School for Girls, and from it I learned to make sugar biscuits. True, not very exciting—but easy enough, like most of the recipes contained in this idiosyncratic compilation of everyday South African cooking. What could be simpler to make than Willie Jacobs’ smoked pork chops or Lucille Tennyson’s Sprite scones? Not much, I’d venture.

But here’s the inside track: cooking is just a subterfuge. This isn’t a cookbook—not really. African Salad is something else, or rather, something more. It is also a book of stories: countless anecdotes and fragments of narrative scattered across the vastness of this country, each one carefully recorded and compiled here.

Take, for instance, the story told by the Hlatswayos. From Soweto, they are authentic pap-and-steak people. As the short biographical note accompanying their recipe explains, mom and dad Hlatswayo are also supporters of rival Soweto soccer teams. An incidental fact—but one that nonetheless influenced the bold black-and-white exterior of their neatly painted home.

Accompanied by perceptive and unaffected photographs, African Salad is a captivating journey into the heart and homes of South Africans—through the front door and straight into the kitchen. After all, it is in the kitchen (and, occasionally, the lounge or dining room) that something of our peculiar national character emerges: its straightforward, unpretentious spirit.

I was continually reminded of this as I paged through African Salad, meeting for the first time people like Asma and Abdul Soeker, “barefoot millionaires” living in central Cape Town. And also Segogoane Masimong. From Thaba Nchu, Mrs Masimong lives in a gabled 1940s platteland home built by her father and does her cooking on an old-fashioned wood stove. A staunch proponent of Tswana-style morogo, she tells the reader: “People who eat other things are just trying to be fancy.”

Mrs Masimong’s words offer a useful reminder. This book is not about the seduction of the unobtainable—the genteel living and sophisticated cooking flaunted by décor magazines and cookbooks everywhere. African Salad is an unashamed celebration of things simply as they are, without embellishment.

Which does not mean this is a book without nuance. After all, if a glass of Coca-Cola is what Aron April says goes into his potjie, so be it."