“District Six was a melting pot of religions and cultures and this is what made our food so interesting. We all had our traditional ways of cooking, and families would learn from their neighbours and adopt different ways of preparing food” 

Sheila Rolls

As a prelude to the launch of the District Six Huiskombuis Food and Memory Cook Book, 23 beautifully mounted portraits and hand-made embroidery recipe cloths were showcased at the District Six Museum Homecoming Centre. The exhibition opened on 11th February 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the declaration of District Six as a white group area in 1966. The cookbook was launched on the 26 November 2016.

The exhibition provides a glimpse into the ‘pages’ of the cookbook revealing a rich cultural food practice that centred on the heart of the home – the kitchen. The title, Huis Kombuis (directly translated from Afrikaans, means ’home kitchen’. Here traditional recipes were brought to life in the rituals of cooking, eating and the sensory exchange at the kitchen table. Culinary rituals and home craft practices maintained and reinforced deep significances and connections with District Six as a place of home, family and community

The desire to publish a story cookbook emerged in 2012 out of the Huiskombuis Reminiscent Craft and Textile Design Workshop, which then developed into a more ambitious project. Our focus was to bring together District Six food stories using seemingly insignificant domestic needlework methods like sewing, appliqué and embroidery, giving importance to its handmade authorship. As a result, the recipe cloths were based on family traditional home cooking which led to a 273-page cookbook that dug deeper into the socio-economic challenges and the diverse cultural food landscape in District Six.

The District Six Huiskombuis Food and Memory Cookbook was published in 2016, in the same year it was nominated as the national winner for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in the category: Culinary Travel –and sold almost half of its total amount of printed copies in less than a year.

Along with the biographies, photographs, maps and newspaper articles, we wanted to emphasize a relationship with the personalised signature that came with each of the contributor’s own handmade embroidery cloths. Featured in the cookbook are 18 hand embroidered traditional recipes – popular inexpensive dishes that were served in many District Six home kitchens; Bobotie, Trotters in Tomato, Snoek and Patats, Bakbrood, Steak and Kidney Pie.