In the mid-1970s, when I was about eight years old, my parents interrupted a perfectly wonderful beach holiday we were spending on the southern coast of South Africa to pay a visit to a mad Afrikaner aunt of my father's. Her name was Annie Strydom, she was nearly 100, and she lived alone on a sprawling sheep farm on the arid plains of the Karoo, an immense outback of scrub and sand that covers 100,000 square miles of the cape interior, just over the coastal mountain ranges.
I recall the insane heat and boredom of that three-hour drive reducing my sisters and me to tears. And the sight of Tant Ann, a fierce, leathery Boer woman with a wooden spoon in one hand and a Bible in the other, terrified us as no ghost story could. As we sat down to lunch in the dark lace-curtained dining room of her Victorian farmhouse, she literally forbade us kids to speak.
But then came the grub. Somehow, in the middle of that desolation, Tant Ann had cooked up the most spectacular spread I'd ever taken a fork to: rosemary roasted lamb, venison (springbok) stew, sweet caramelized butternut squash and mashed green beans and potato. Incredibly, all of it had been grown or slaughtered on her farm. Afrikaners call this rich, hearty food ma se kos, "Mother's cooking," and it would be true to say, as my sisters and I buried our faces in crisp lamb cutlets and mounds of bright orange butternut squash, that right then we loved that old woman as much as our own mum.
Since emerging from decades of isolation imposed on it during apartheid, South Africa has been quick to showcase its wonders to the world. From the teeming wildlife and stylish game lodges around Kruger National Park, in the northeast, to the sublime beaches and coastal vineyards of the cape proper, it has much to be proud of. Yet apart from the bags of beef and ostrich biltong (a tastier, Boer version of jerky) that you can purchase at any airport, it's almost impossible to find authentic old-style Afrikaner cooking of the kind I enjoyed on that desert adventure. To do so, you still have to head to the Karoo.
Settled beginning in the early 1700s by Boer (Dutch-descended) pioneers, the Karoo is South Africa's timeless heartland. Most South Africans dismiss it as drive-through country — they race past it, with the AC blasting, to get to the coast — but for those who hang around a while, the Karoo becomes a haunting, achingly beautiful landscape of giant skies, blazing sunsets and serene silences. What's more, in recent years, urban sophisticates tired of the crime in the cities have been moving into the Karoo's sleepy towns. They're opening guesthouses and galleries and buying sheep and ostrich farms, stocking them with wildlife and turning them into safari lodges.
On a recent visit to the Cape Town area, I reenacted that childhood journey across the scrubby plains. Traveling alone this time, without resolute parents or screaming siblings, I spent a weekend at the Karoo's newest safari lodge: Samara Private Game Reserve, a 70,000-acre, six-suite property three hours north of Port Elizabeth (100 miles east of the famous Garden Route) and just forty-five minutes south of the historic colonial settlement of Graaff-Reinet, South Africa's fourth oldest city, founded in 1786. Samara — guided by the twenty-five-year-old Afrikaner chef Quintinn van Rensburg, a graduate of the country's esteemed Institute of Culinary Arts, at the Spier vineyards, in Stellenbosch — specializes in what it calls Karoo Kitchen food. It's ma se kos with a modern twist.
I've visited dozens of safari lodges in Africa, and Samara is distinctly different. Owned and designed by Sarah Tompkins, a glamorous London-based forty-something South African, it has as its centerpiece not a generic wood and thatch lodge but an original 19th-century Victorian Karoo farmhouse with a handsome wraparound veranda and a hooded corrugated-iron roof, a house Tompkins originally purchased as a family vacation home. Lush green lawns in front merge into a taupe landscape of scrub and acacia thorns, while a range of sheer-sided, flat-topped dolomite mountains that resemble the Aztec pyramids towers over the lodge and forms a giant natural amphitheater. At sunset the rocks become a swirl of red and pink, and the adobe yellow farmhouse glows like burning coals.
I arrived just in time for lunch: a Karoo lamb burger served on a bed of avocado puree with butternut-squash and sweet-potato chips and spiced with a pickle relish. Lamb is the signature delicacy of the Karoo. The region's sheep get fat on anchor karoo, a wild herb that smells like a mixture of fennel and rosemary, and their meat has a tender, herbed, gamy quality; it's without a doubt some of the finest lamb in the world. I wasn't sure the burger did it justice, but the vegetables, slow-cooked to give them that sweet caramelized taste beloved by Afrikaners, reminded me immediately of Tant Ann's butternut mash.
Dinner was more traditional. After a two-hour evening game drive — the reserve has been restocked with giraffes, rhinos, elands, kudus, black wildebeests, mountain zebras and even cheetahs — I joined the nine other guests in a thatched boma, or outdoor enclosure, next to the main house for a braai, the fabled South African barbecue. South Africans adore their meat, and Samara's cooks grilled mounds of fatty boerewors (sausage of minced beef, lamb and spices), lamb chops marinated in stewed apricots and tender medallions of springbok.
The springbok was excellent, with a rich, beefy taste; Samara also serves it as a carpaccio appetizer. There's a hypocritical tendency at many high-end safari lodges not to upset sensitive Western tourists by feeding them game. That's silly. South Africa is famous for its venison — springbok, kudu, eland, wildebeest — which is low in fat and cholesterol and, when hunted responsibly (as it is at Samara), entirely environmentally sustainable. I was a little disappointed not to be visiting in winter, the Karoo hunting season, when van Rensburg really goes to town, making sausage, steaks and salami from eland and kudu and a stew of slow-cooked black wildebeest, the finest of all the game meats.
Samara sources more than venison from its land. An organic garden on the property supplies most of the vegetables, and what the reserve doesn't grow it brings in from elsewhere in the Karoo. Which is this semi-desert's miracle: despite its surface aridity, it has a Mediterranean climate, not unlike that of Andalusia, in southern Spain. Farmers across the region produce everything, including grapes, olives, almonds, apricots, figs, port wine and artisanal cheeses. One green bean salad I ate was drizzled with olive oil made in the Karoo town of Prince Albert, in the west, and sprinkled with goat cheese from Nieu Bethesda, a quiet, artsy hamlet north of Graaff-Reinet.
The morning after the barbecue, I decided to skip the game drive and relax by the pool with a book before cooling off in the main house's living room, surrounded by zebra-print rugs, cowhide cushions, ostrich-egg ornaments and a stuffed porcupine; you could have eaten some of the furniture. It put me in a good mood for lunch.
Samara derives part of its charm from the different settings for meals — boma, mountaintop, farmhouse, veranda — and this particular lunch was an elegant picnic under a white canvas tent on a riverbank in the bush. The reserve bakes its own bread, and we feasted on thick BLTs on rye (presented in brown paper bags held closed with porcupine quills); pepper, avocado and ostrich-steak wraps; and miniature spinach and tomato quiches with a delectable crumb pastry. Most delicious of all was the pita bread filled with mango, yogurt and chicken curry. Malaysian slaves shipped to the Cape colony in the 1600s introduced curry and chilies to Boer cuisine; today Cape Malay people are an integral part of Afrikaner culture. That night, as part of a more formal, four-course meal, we had bobotie spring-roll canapés; bobotie is an old-fashioned Malaysian minced curry and egg dish that Afrikaners have eaten for centuries.
If I had one complaint about Samara, it was about the breakfasts, or, more specifically, the coffee. Any self-respecting Karoo farm kitchen always has a steaming pot of strong coffee on the stove, but I found the lodge's brew weak and switched to tea. Perhaps the idea is that all the sweet vegetables and decadent desserts, one an espresso crème brûlée with chocolate sorbet and a vanilla biscuit, would perk us up sufficiently.
I made up for this deficiency on my final morning, which I spent in Graaff-Reinet, a historic town of many museums, oxcart-wide streets, thatched and gabled Cape Dutch and Victorian bungalows and cluttered antiques shops. Beatrice Barnard, doyenne of Karoo food, runs the Andries Stockenström Guesthouse there; technically, only guests at her six-room 1819 manor house may dine on the premises, but van Rensburg, who hails from Graaff-Reinet, kindly persuaded Barnard to invite me to breakfast.
Trained at the Ritz in Paris and the Michelin-starred Parkheuvel restaurant, in the Netherlands, Barnard makes what she calls "South African food with an opera dress on." I would have loved a dinner performance: on the menu that evening were ostrich-liver pâté, lamb in red-wine jus and butter-and-cream-heavy Malva pudding. But breakfast in her manor house's shaded courtyard was still spectacular. The table was laden with bowls of stewed plums, pears and figs; a muesli of oats, honey and dried apricots; and fresh yogurt. I ordered an Emmentaler and portobellini mushroom omelet and wolfed it down with — at last! — several mugs of rich, strong farm coffee. After I finished, Barnard presented me with a box of muffins (grated apple, carrot, golden raisin) right from the oven. "For the drive back," she said, winking. "The best American muffins are found in our desert!" The muffins were like the Karoo: hot and dry on the outside; inside, all warmth and soul.
Samara Private Game Reserve Double rooms from $590, all inclusive; manor house $2,550. Off the R75 near Graaff-Reinet; 011-27-49-891-0880; samara.co.za.
Andries Stockenström Guesthouse Double rooms from $180, including breakfast and dinner. 100 Cradock St., Graaff-Reinet; 011-27-49-892-4575; stockenstrom.co.za.
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