I came from a background in music and psychology. I had no idea what it would take to write a recipe book. It couldn’t be that difficult. There was quite a number of South African expat women in Warsaw, most of whom were queens in the kitchen. We also had two South African chefs working at two big hotels They would all contribute recipes. We would type them up, ask someone to translate them, and have the book ring-bound and ready to sell at the International Charity Bazaar in December – two and a bit months later.
Collecting the recipes didn’t go as smoothly as planned, and the woman who was leading the project at the time moved to another country. The project was left hanging – of course not ready for the bazaar – and at the beginning of 2007, I was asked if I would like to take it over. It sounded like a plan, and since I was in a new country with nothing to do, well, why not?
During the next meeting with the group, someone asked why we didn’t go all out and do a proper book – fancy paper, cover, etc. What about photographs of the food for each recipe?
The recipes collected from the expats were not enough to make a ‘proper’ book, and with the help of our neighbour Maggie Parsons[1] I started collecting recipes myself. As interesting as this process was, with much fun on the side, it wasn’t without its complications.
Some recipes were sourced from published recipe books in South Africa, for which we had to obtain copyright permission. If one such book, for example, used grams and millilitres, we had to ask permission to change the measurements to cups and spoons, which was to be the standard measurement throughout our book. For consistency, I learnt.
Other recipes were collected from family and friends in South Africa; some sent by email, some read over Skype (the only long‑distance call app at the time – yes!), and some figured out in the kitchen. I still have a scar from a hot oil splash to show for it.
Some of the recipes were given to me as a method without a list of ingredients; others had a list of ingredients with ‘mix all together’ at the bottom. We had to try those recipes and sometimes adjust the quantities of a recipe written to serve four people while it would actually only serve two – perhaps three if each guest got half a spoonful.
The Afrikaans recipes had to be translated into English, and the whole bunch of English recipes then had to be translated into Polish.
All the recipes thus had to be written, almost from scratch, in the same format to :
- Name of the recipe
- Source of the recipe
- List of ingredients
- Method
- Number of servings
Some of the South African ingredients were not available in Poland, so we had to find alternatives or cut the recipe and replace it with another one because we needed the same number of recipes for each section of the book.
The English collection had to be fully written, edited and proofread; it had to be perfect before it could be translated. Fourteen drafts later, we had a full English version ready for translation. Fourteen? But why?! you may well ask.
Halfway through the English version, someone casually dropped into a conversation: You do know that Polish and South African cups were not exactly the same size, don’t you? No, how would we know? We’d only landed in the country three months earlier, still waiting for our consignment. I didn’t cook much in the self‑catering apartment, let alone bake! My editor’s husband and son did the cooking in their household, so there was no need for her to know this information. (And yes! All writers need an editor, even if they are editors themselves.)
A whole flurry ensued. Would it be better to change all the recipes from cups and spoons to grams and millilitres? The testing would have to be much more rigorous than we had initially thought. I don’t have to go into the details for you to imagine the chaos. What would have happened if, at that point, we had to tell the translator to change almost everything she had done up to then? How many extra hours of work – which translates into money per hour, of course. And yet, after our perfect fourteenth draft went to the translator, we still found discrepancies that had to be fixed, so the two versions had to be redrafted side by side another five or six times before we could send it to the printers for layout. The layout brought its own problems because Polish sentences are generally longer than English ones, so some Polish recipes became three pages instead of two, or two pages instead of one, and we had to sometimes rewrite the method instructions of recipes in order to fit a recipe on two pages at most, or the layout would become impossible
[1] Maggie is a British editor who lived in South Africa for twenty years, where she worked at Macmillan publishers. For me, stumbling upon her at the time was the pinnacle of synchronicity. I knew nothing about the making of books while she knew how each step followed on the other from the first rough draft to the final printing proofs. Through that process she taught me, with firm patience, the foundational principles of everything I know today.