LET us take a moment to acknowledge and appreciate the rise of the bread course in the fine dining milieu. Freshly baked bread is almost always good, but it’s enjoying its moment, served with creative accompaniments which, at La Petite Colombe, each have a significant meaning.
A mere two days after this year’s Eat Out Woolworths Restaurant Awards, where it was awarded three stars as well as the Eat Out Patrón Mixology Award (for the second year), I sat down to lunch at a table by the window, where the sun streamed in and if I wasn’t absorbed in the food, I could gaze outside at the pristine Leeu Estates gardens and the sculptures therein. It’s very pretty but the meal took all my attention. So captivated was I by the bread course, I have decided to separate it into one story, with part two covering the rest of the meal, to follow next week.
Head chef Peter Duncan is a towering presence but he’s a gentle giant. I must confess to a chef-crush, after listening to him tell his stories, and how important his family is, and where he came from. On the plate, it translates into honesty and being true to himself and his roots. We can thank his dad for this, who admonished Peter to “cook who you are, tell me who you are” and this is woven throughout the menu, with deep meaning and significance in every detail.
Before the bread course, Peter came out with a huge jar of bubbly sourdough starter, “Oom Piet se suurdeeg“, named for his grandfather who lived his whole life in Franschhoek. Peter, already working in the La Colombe group, was part of the team that started La Petite Colombe in 2017. The following year, he moved to pastry, which also means bread. “I’m not going to stand here and lie to you – the first few breads were complete flops!” he laughed. The intervening years have led to perfection, using this same starter, which Peter likes to show before the course is served.
Six pentagon-shaped dishes surround the quartered round loaf in the middle, which opens like a flower. “It’s my life in the form of a puzzle,” explained Peter. “I specifically chose a puzzle for this because in the centre – even though I named the starter after my grandfather – I think we all know Grandma is the cornerstone of the family, so this one in the middle is the grandma. Should the centre part of the family pass away, the rest tend to scatter so I’m basically bringing the whole family back together with my cooking.”
Each part of this bread course represents something special, and you’re invited to taste in any order, or mix and match. There is house-churned butter and Cape Malay jelly in jigsaw pieces; and piccalilli made with vegetables from the on-site farm, whatever is leftover after the weekly allocation for the kitchen. The bright green dill oil inside tear-shaped snoek pâté is for Peter’s dad, the man who taught him how to clean all types of fish, and who also lost his arm – a sad moment. The spiced pork fat (which gets a dusting of lemon crumb to cut the fat) is a nod to Grandma: “I’m from Saron, which is at the back of Tulbagh – a very rural community where there are not a lot of shops or access to shops,” said Peter. “People will have pigs or sheep and when it’s slaughter time, Grandma had a coal oven. She would take all the fat, put it in the oven and completely forget about and then transfer all that fat into a Rama container.”
And then there’s the olive oil and balsamic…perhaps you think that is terribly basic, but it’s estate olive oil and balsamic from Babylonstoren, but more important is the story it tells. Peter comes from a place where the only thing that went on bread was butter. On his first trip to Barcelona, all they got was a bowl of olive oil and it was a learning experience. Further illustrating Peter’s food journey is his favourite, which he says shows how far he’s come from pork fat and butter, to make something that looks exactly like a large black truffle. Inside is the silkiest chicken liver parfait you can imagine. “Duck liver and foie gras are seen as exclusive, and we treat it the same way, poaching it in butter and letting it sit until it soaks it all up” he said.
And with that, I was left to taste and savour not only the bread but the warmth of its stories.
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- Note: featured image differs slightly from what I had. Come back next week for more…
