Jackie Cameron School of Food and Wine
Where: 241 Old Howick Road, Hilton
Call: 076 505 7538
The Jackie Cameron School of Food and Wine offers monthly food and wine pairing sundowners at the school, an event taking in many of SA’s best wineries. They make for fun and sociable evenings, without the full fine dining fuss and intensity.
The school also offers regular carveries and functions for events like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. Their high teas, part of the student syllabus and usually held towards the end of the year, are also popular.
I’d been wanting to pop in for some time, and with my adventurous soon-to-be foodie niece back home in Hilton from Cape Town for a week, I jumped at the opportunity. This was the same person who, aged 3, would only eat if I put tomato sauce in a shot glass and cut strips of feta, cucumber and cheddar for dipping. How things change.
The school is a comfortable homely space, with a large dining room adjoining the open kitchen, which is a hive of activity. There’s a smaller comfy dining room and space to spill out onto a large open terrace. Not that night: it was bucketing with rain.
The students had only been there a month. As Cameron says, they’re only really learning to cut onions at this stage, but they were all given a bottle of wine and told to taste it, and come up with a food pairing which they could produce ‒ under the watchful eye of chef Andiswa Mqedlane, who supervises the kitchen.
Produce they certainly did, admirably. Cameron says many regulars at these dinners enjoy checking the students’ progress over the year. So watch out for the November tasting.
Four of her students were sponsored by Koo and had won a place at the school as part of a competition, earning their stripes in the kitchen against 570 other applicants. Known as the Koo Kids, we pretty soon called them the Kool Kids, and they were keen to impress.
Glen Carlou, a wine estate in Paarl, is known for its great sauvignon blancs and chardonnays, but there were some new offerings to delight as well. We were welcomed by their first bubbles and yeasty fresh blanc de blancs which set the tone nicely.
On arrival we found some Pietermaritzburg friends and gatecrashed their table.
The famed Glen Carlou sauvignon blanc was paired with a fish taco prepared by young woman who told us she had dropped a BA in philosophy, politics and law to enter the Koo competition. Her dish was served with cabbage slaw, fennel Greek yoghurt and pickled red onion. Maybe a shade fish heavy, the taco was a delight with its extra firm crunch, which I later discovered was achieved by using polenta in the flour mix. The fennel yoghurt lifted it nicely for a lovely first effort.
Then we were served a lovely crisp lemon chicken pie with pineapple and mint salsa, which paired nicely with Glen Carlou’s petite chardonnay. This is a new unwooded version of the grape which the winemaker described as “very smashable”. Agreed.
Possibly the highlight of the evening was a humble cauliflower dish, a deconstructed cauliflower cheese if you will. It was paired with a big bold wooded chardonnay. The cauliflower was blanched and then twice fried in a pepper and cayenne batter, glazed with a honey and tabasco glaze and served with a rich cheese dipping sauce. I am not sure where the young man found those pepper notes in the chardonnay, but certainly all that pepper pulled them out of the wine, and a good cheese sauce will always do a chardonnay justice. We were impressed.
The Glen Carlou merlot got the meatball treatment: smoked meatballs in a red pepper and tomato sauce. While the meatballs were perhaps a shade dense and a little salty, the sauce was silky and most enjoyable. At the table they felt it needed a small scoop of buttery mash potato or something along those lines. Another good first effort.
Dessert is always a difficult pairing, especially when using chocolate, which often kills the wine completely. So it was a brave Kool Kid who, having learnt to bake from her grandmother, opted for a dark chocolate tart with a berry centre. It was paired with another new range from Glen Carlou, the petite classique, a 50/50 merlot and malbec blend, another wine aimed at easy drinking. What a surprise: the sweet decidedly jammy berry centre certainly lifted everything so wine and chocolate paired nicely.
As Cameron congratulated her students on their first efforts, we “smashed” another glass of that petite classique. An enjoyable evening.
Food: 4 (for a first attempt)
Service: 4
Ambience: 4½
The Bill: R480
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