In this episode of A Table in the Corner, I chat to Pamela Shippel-Granoth, the cook, teacher and restaurateur behind Fynkos at Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town. Pamela has spent almost 50 years working with food, beginning with home cooking and small-scale catering before moving into cookery teaching, recipe development, radio and food writing.
We trace her career from those early days through 12 years at Pick n Pay, where she ran cooking demonstrations and built a cookery school, to three months studying at Prue Leith's cooking school in London and a decade running a catering business in Israel.
We then get to Fynkos, the Kirstenbosch restaurant she took over more than 20 years ago and has developed into a daytime restaurant built around fresh ingredients, baking and cooking from scratch. Pamela explains why she has always focused on teaching people how to cook, why salads became such an important part of her repertoire and how many of the recipes people kept asking her for eventually found their way into the Fynkos at Kirstenbosch cookbook we have just made together.
It's also a conversation about a lifetime spent feeding people, learning through experimentation and passing that knowledge on. As we mark the publication of the book, Pamela reflects on the career that brought her to Fynkos and the food that has kept people coming back.
- www.rwm2012.comOn Instagram @a_table_inthecornerCover image sketched by Courtney Cara LawsonAll profile portraits by Russel Wasserfall unless otherwise creditedTitle music: 'In Time' by Olexy via Pixabay