When I was 12, I developed a hankering for potato dauphinoise.

Wandering through a Perth supermarket, I picked ingredients I assumed must feature: milk, margarine (no one wanted saturated fat in the early 90s), Kraft Singles (the Kuala Lumpur of my childhood didn’t have a flourishing cheese industry), potatoes.

The result of all these ingredients tossed into a pan - the powdery-edged potatoes replete with raw, crunchy centre, swimming in a shallow soup-dish lake of man-made oil-topped milk, the gobs of melted plastic-cheese - was unequivocally, unremittingly vile.

I served it to a table of encouraging aunties, who responded with exclamations of joy. “Oh, aren’t you clever? So creamy!” “Doesn’t that look delicious? Yum, yum!” They ate the lot.

It took a year for me to realise how truly disgusting my concoction was. But when I did, I was deeply, soul-crushingly ashamed, horrified at the suffering I’d inflicted, and smoulderingly angry at all the supportive relatives who’d lied to me.

South Africa’s food culture has, for decades, been the victim of unwitting sabotage.

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