Short description
The name of Dr C Louis Leipoldt, truly a South African icon, is synonymous with poetry, medicine, botany and food. These talents combine uniquely in Leipoldt’s Food & Wine, a book in which the poet describes exquisitely the art of preparing food for the table and the use of wine both as an ingredient in the preparation of food and in its own right.
Long description
In 1946, the year before his death, Leipoldt completed two quintessentially South African works, Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery and Three Hundred Years of Cape Wine. Moreover, between 1942 and 1947, he wrote a series of columns in Die Huisgenoot subsequently published as Polfyntjies vir die Proe, now translated into English under the title Culinary Treasures.
This trilogy of literary and culinary gems, Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery, Culinary Treasures and Three Hundred Years of Cape Wine, is enhanced by a comprehensive index that makes it easy to use and consult as a cookbook.
Leipoldt’s Food & Wine is a cookbook, but it is also much more—a delectable, amusing, insightful record of cultural and social history, delightfully observed and expressed by the master himself. Food and wine were Leipoldt’s abiding passions, and he writes about them expressively as a poet, authoritatively as a medical doctor and botanist, and knowledgeably with the true humility of the expert enthusiast.
The contents of this book spring both literally and metaphorically from the soil of South Africa, both imparting and preserving important aspects of our heritage, yet Leipoldt was a man who transcended boundaries of all descriptions—his views are fully contextualised and are universal in their compass.
Leipoldt’s Food & Wine, painstakingly edited and indexed by T S Emslie and P L Murray, is as appropriate in the kitchen as it is in the library. Its practical aspect will ensure that it is routinely consulted, re-read and discussed, especially as the delightful Culinary Treasures has never before been available in English.
South African Country Life magazine has agreed to print one of Leipoldt’s articles from Culinary Treasures in each of their twelve issues commencing in January 2004, so there will be valuable, ongoing, nationwide publicity for the ensuing calendar year.