There are many reasons to visit Cape Town at South Africa’s southern tip in spring. It’s a so-called shoulder season, so there is no crush of summer visitors. Flights are less expensive. And flowers: One of the most awe-inspiring floral displays in the world unfolds along and adjacent to the South African region of the West Coast in the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces, from late winter through September. For a forager, there is one more incentive to travel: Veldkool (pr. FELT-khoowill). This native vegetable is the flower bud of several species of Trachyandra, a strappy-leafed geophyte that grows in sandy soil along beaches, in the veld, along roadside verges, and in a few enterprising urban gardens.
Join me on a culinary foray along the edges of a Capetonian spring.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
Veldkool’s unopened buds are reminiscent of asparagus and are sometimes called wild asparagus, which is no more accurate botanically than the more common Afrikaans name, which translates as field or meadow cabbage. The buds’ tender season spans several weeks, as different species of Trachyandra bloom. These unobtrusive, resilient plants have every potential to become a cultivated seasonal crop in South Africa’s winter rainfall regions, even as their natural populations succumb to development.
On a recent visit to Cape Town, my first glimpse of veldkool was within spray-splash of the sea on a walkway that connects the communities of Muizenberg and Kalk Bay along the False Bay coast. Squeezed between railway tracks and the kelp-fringed blue water, remnants of coastal vegetation persist in the rocky and sandy shoreline, beside a path that skirts tidal pools and rock pools brimming with sea urchins and anemones, benches where people sit looking out to sea, and rocks where red-beaked African oyster catchers patrol exposed mussel banks for dinner. It is scenic. Among blankets of semi-succulent dune spinach (Tetragonia decumbens), the slender buds of Trachyandra ciliata, historically called slaaikool (salad cabbage) had just begun to bloom. Dark-bodied Cape honeybees buzzed the scented flowers.
Two weeks later and a few hundred feet higher, this veldkool species was blooming profusely above the bay, in sooty sand. Above its lush leaves stood the charred skeletons of burned pincushion proteas. Two fires swept these slopes last January and February. Now, after the wettest winter on record, green life is surging. While the fires can be devastating to humans, the fynbos biome—like California’s chaparral—evolved to burn, and its vegetation depends and thrives on it.
The other useful veldkool growing locally is T. divaricata. I think of it as smooth veldkool, because its stout stems are glossy, but it is known as sandkool—apt because it thrives in the deep sand of dunes, although it can also emerge improbably from rocky recesses where just enough grit has accumulated to sustain the plants.
The first result you will find after a quick Internet search of this species is Australian. There, sandkool has escaped, good and proper, and has become a pernicious weed, known locally as dune onion. Dear Australia, at least you can eat it.
As days and weeks pass the sandkool’s flower-stems branch. When they eventually bloom, this vegetable is usually too maturely fibrous to harvest as food. As long as those stems can be snapped by hand, they are tender enough to eat.
The sandkool buds I collected had not yet begun to branch, and were fatly succulent.
While a small number of urban farms on the Cape Flats have planted trial plots of Trachyandra, this is (still*) not a vegetable that has begun to appear at market (at least, to my knowledge). Since the plants thrive in sand and on neglect, they could not be easier to grow. They soak up winter rains, and endure dry Cape summers. But as interest in the indigenous vegetable increases, led by social media that amplifies the work of individual foragers and of local celebrity-chefs chefs like Kobus van der Merwe, curious cooks and creative market producers will take note.
* In one of his Culinary Treasures essays, published between 1942 and 1947 for the magazine Huisgenoot, the author, novelist, poet, and medical doctor C. Louis Leipoldt wrote about veldkool that “…city folks have hardly discovered [it] yet. Once they find out how delicious veldkool is, it will quite possibly be cultivated in our gardens, as there is no reason why it cannot be tamed’.” He liked to cook veldkool with the its tart native neighbor, suuring, Oxalis pes-caprae, better known Stateside as Bermuda buttercup.
Further north, and growing further inland, another choice veldkool species is T. falcata, whose budding stalks appear at the height of local flower season in the Northern Cape. It adds to the regional viability of the plants’ potential cultivation.
While veldkool bredie (bredie is a slow-cooked meat stew featuring a single, seasonal vegetable) is a traditional spring dish—for the handful of cooks who make it—I chose to deploy my modest forages very simply. Bowls of yogurt were laced with the pungent flowers of three-cornered leeks (locally weedy Allium triquetrum), while their stems were chopped into melted butter to deliver a delicious if heretical riff on Turkish çilbir. A toasted piece of quintessentially South Africa seed bread added necessary crunch.
And if that wasn’t simple enough, the follow up was even better. Toasted ciabatta scrubbed with a clove of garlic, a generous pour of peppery olive oil from the farm Morgenster, and a flurry of flaky salt allowed the veldkool to be itself: succulent, seasonal, and greenly appealing.
Looking at this image as I write, just a week after sinking my teeth into that toast, my mouth waters.
See also:
- Have Flowers, Will Travel: South Africa’s Superblooms
- Spring at Jaftha’s Flower Farm in Cape Town
- Green Fig Preserve Recipe: A Taste of South Africa
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