FOOD & HOME magazine: May 2012 Oh, marmalade! Baker, marmalade maker and champion of old-fashioned citrus preserves, Steve Oldroyd has returned from London, relocated to Citrusdal and invested in his community through food. No sooner had we arrived at Hebron, a guest house at the top of the Piekenierskloof Pass, than Steve asked us to join him in attending to his sourdough. He inserted a thermometer into the baking loaves, nodded and began ferrying them out of the oven. Once the bread was marginally cooled, we were handed thick slices and a jar of marmalade. An unsurprising accompaniment when the orange orchards of Citrusdal stretch out below, except this glistening amber confiture was made with treasured Seville oranges Steve procured from a contact in what he calls the valley’s ‘tannie network’. Together with his wife Caro, Steve Oldroyd is Hebron’s proprietor. A serious foodie and self-taught cook, it’s taken him the three years since the couple returned from London – four children and 40-foot container in tow – to feel satisfied with his bread. As dinner begins, Steve leaves his sauces simmering to uncork bottles of Cederberg Shiraz. Seven-year-old Noah wanders in snacking on mange tout picked from the veggie garden and Caro gathers up three giggling children barrelling through the dining room. First out was venison, smoked over rooibos in the old General Electric fridge Steve fashioned into a smoker, and dressed with his own recipe ponzu, black and white sesame seeds, Asian greens and herbs. A red-braised pork belly with shitakes followed, again illustrating his confident plating and robust flavours. Exposure to the UK restaurant circuit at the same time as a British culinary reawakening gained traction definitely shaped Steve’s palate. Just as problem solving at the peak of dinner service in Britain’s capital city no doubt sharpened his already friendly, incisive manner. Starting out as a young waiter in 1994, he worked at Gary Rhodes’s The People’s Palace and after a brief stint at Le Caprice, was appointed junior manager at Peter Gordon’s The Sugar Club. Steve found Gordon’s cuisine compelling and took note of how solid technique backed up every aspect required to build a dish. However, Steve credits most of what he knows to a less public figure, chef Gary Knowles. By then, Steve had moved into management, training and leading restaurant start-up teams while Caro, a landscape designer, cultivated a successful garden design business. “Gary taught me that cooking is a matter of understanding what you want to get out of it but doing simple things is the most difficult – there is nowhere to hide,” says Steve. This comes full circle back to the marmalade: nothing more than fruit, sugar and water, it relies on perfecting the method. As a regular stallholder, Steve turns out sourdough and marmalade for the Citrusdal Farmers’ Market. He swears by Marguerite Patten’s Jams, Chutneys, Preserves, Vinegars and Oils: Golden Rules and over 250 Gorgeous Recipes for Successful Preserving, a plentiful supply of stoneground flour from Riebeek West and flour milled from the rye used in crop rotation for rooibos. Sensitive to treading on the ‘tannie’ turf in jam terms, Steve broadens the focus with homemade sausages, either 100% pork – from an organic farmer at the foot of the Cederberg mountains – or freshly smoked chorizo. He always cooks up something to eat in the moment, like koftas wrapped in homemade flatbreads. “Anything but boerewors rolls,” says Steve before adding, “It was interesting getting Afrikaans men to eat falafels.” Goodness knows what they must have thought when Hebron’s ‘Global Wednesday’ dinners – now supported almost exclusively by locals – first launched. Undeterred, Steve had offered them the world: from a Double-happiness Chinese banquet to chicken, olive and homemade preserved lemon tagine served in glazed terracotta flowerpot bases (for lack of authentic tagines on Moroccan night). So how did a falafel-touting rooinek manage to secure those Seville oranges? Steve stocked the Hebron farm stall with bottled goods made by farmers’ wives, reasoning: “If people don’t buy what these women have made, there’s no need for them to sit at the kitchen table with their husbands peeling fruit. We need to keep those recipes alive.” The sentiment is shared. When Tannie Hanna Janse van Rensburg demonstrated her lemoen krulle (orange curls) in the Hebron kitchen for an episode of Pasella, her candied citrus peel struck a chord with urban Afrikaans viewers. “People showed up to buy it and rang up for the recipe,” says Steve. The traditional recipes were, in turn, a natural introduction to less common citrus varieties – like Siter (Citron) and Pompelmoes – suited to preserving. Like the Seville oranges, one or two trees still exist on some properties. Besides an old variety of naartjie called Groen Skil, and Valencia and Navel Oranges, Hebron, thanks to Caro’s talents, also has a flourishing vegetable garden that supplies the restaurant. “This is possibly the hardest work of anything we’ve done,” acknowledges Steve on the subject of moving back to South Africa, “but now I get to wake up in the morning, put my shorts on and walk across the garden to work.” Citrusdal, on the other hand, gets someone who cares enough to be a one-man food revolution. www.hebron.co.za | Call 022 921 2595