Cooking up a cottagecore storm

It’s nearly 10 years since an unknown South African author set off a lively bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair with a debut novel. The author was Sally Andrew and the book was Recipes for Love and Murder, a cosy mystery set in the Karoo that went on to sell by the bakkie load. There are now four books in the series that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. What is the secret to this astonishing success?

The answer lies in the subtitle: A Tannie Maria Mystery. Tannie Maria was like no character we’d met before, a 50-something and homely woman in soft red veldskoens, tending her chickens and vegetable patch on her farm in the Klein Karoo. She is the agony aunt of the local newspaper, dishing out recipes alongside her homespun wisdom.

When a reader is murdered, she sets about investigating the case. Solving mysteries, mending broken hearts, munching on vetkoek bursting with fragrant mince. All against a backdrop of gwarrie trees and aloe-studded veld, with the turtledoves calling and the yellow moon rising. It is a magical recipe; the recipe of comfort reading.

In early interviews, Andrew confessed that she wasn’t much of a cook and had instead approached the real experts in her community for their best bobotie and bredie, beskuit and cake recipes, giving them due credit and providing Tannie Maria with an irresistible array of dishes.

Now these recipes have been gathered into a bright, busy new collection laden with photographs of the Karoo and interleaved with Tannie Maria’s letters and jottings, titled Recipes to Die Live For. Much of the food is traditional South African fare: mutton curry and frikkadels, mealiepap and pampoenpaai, cut with more contemporary dishes such as spekboom ice cream. And yes, that’s the world-famous Venus cake right on the cover, the sumptuous peanut-butter, coffee, and cocoa bombe that for a time no self-respecting book club could be without. Reading through Tannie Maria’s steady wisdom again, her gentle aphorisms and observances — “In the end what matters most is love and food.

Without them you go hungry.” — it’s clear that Andrew pre-empted the present global mood, the yearning for connection and community, for slow food and friendship. She opened up a seam of universal longing in her stories. This longing, and the remedy for it, has found new expression in the current trend known as “cottagecore”.

Sites such as TikTok and Instagram are heaving with young women baking, planting, stitching, knitting, and dusting. They’re putting up preserves, taming menacing sourdough starters, sifting organic compost, and picking out embroidery silks. Commentators say the cottagecore yearning for the bucolic life that we’re seeing is evidence of a deep-rooted need to escape from stress and trauma. Sally Andrew worked that out a decade ago.