Frances Bissell

Food writer

For a short time as a schoolgirl my family lived on a wine farm near Stellenbosch and it was here that I first tasted food other than Yorkshire home cooking, such as bredies, bobotie, mebos, melktert. Much later, I was thrilled to buy a second-hand copy, which formed part of the late Professor John Fuller’s extensive library, of this elegant facsimile of the 1902 publication, “being a chronicle of daily events and monthly work in a Cape household, with numerous cooking recipes, and notes on gardening, poultry keeping etc”.