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BEST FAMILY
TRADITION
By Hilary Prendini Toffoli
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The
Swiss Family Rietmann
"There
are no Swiss horns, yodellers or cuckoo clocks in this story. There is,
however, Swiss bratwurst and lots of it," says Hilary Prendini Toffoli.
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THE RIETMANNS HAVE been making bratwurst for
almost 300 years. And they’re still at it. Their manufacturing facility
in the industrial Cape Town suburb of Ottery is busy and is just about as
far as you can get, both geographically and psychologically, from where it
all began in a picturesque Swiss city nestling in the hills not far from
Lake Constance.
Ulrich Rietmann sold the first Rietmann’s
Bratwurst in St Gallen in 1738. A fussy master butcher, he called it St
Gallen Bratwurst and made it according to a traditional family recipe.
‘St
Gallen Bratwurst—a traditional family recipe—was a mildly spiced
sausage, delicious with hot sweet mustard, fried onions and potato salad’
Five generations later, nothing much has
changed. Ulrich’s 40-year-old descendant Paul Rietmann goes every
weekday at 6am into his small hygienic factory, wearing his clean white
jacket and pants, pristine rubber wellies and protective headgear.
Together with his staff of 10 and his wife Glynis, he produces a large
variety of processed and cured exotica like Bockwurst, Chorizo,
Debreciener as well as cooked and cured hams and salamis. All destined for
the frenzied deli sections of chain stores like Pick’n’Pay, Checkers
and Spar.
“It’s been a long and interesting
journey,” says Paul’s father Kurt, a likeable, greying 61-year-old who
came to South Africa when he was four, and whose uncles were invariably
master butchers like himself and the father he was named after.
Swiss butchers pride themselves on their precise
fresh meat cuts and manufactured products. It’s an industry that has
attracted 45 of the 68 male Rietmanns in Kurt’s family over the past 150
years. Several of them have ended up in South Africa.
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“Initially my father was Uncle Ulrich’s
partner in a Paarl butchery. Then he got a three-year contract to run a
butchery on the Moravian mission station at Elim, in the little German
enclave of seven white families. Fortunately a lot of the local Elim folk
understood German, because my father didn’t speak Afrikaans or English
at that stage. I had to interpret for him.”
Though the Rietmanns lived in a lovely big
thatched house, which is now an orphanage, life was not easy in this
charming village. Twice a week Kurt’s mother Ruth used to leave at three
in the morning to take meat to Cape Town outlets. Kurt was sent to
boarding school in nearby Napier. Quite a culture shock.
From Elim the hard-working Rietmanns went to
Somerset West and then opened a butchery in Knysna, which they sold at a
profit. When Kurt was 11, they opened a Cape Town butchery at 200 Victoria
Road, Woodstock. It became an institution.
 
In 1957 Woodstock was a middle-class suburb full
of immigrants from Europe, including a big Jewish community. In Cape Town,
where the traditional cuisine was boiled, boring and British, and the only
places to eat out were staid country clubs and hotels (Italian restaurants
came later), the Continental immigrants welcomed the new butchery’s
range of deli meat cuts, sausages and processed meats with open arms. The
only other butchery doing anything like that was Braams.
“In those days South African butcheries tended
to put sawdust on the wooden floor to absorb the blood,” says Kurt,
“and they didn’t always sweep it every day, so it used to stink. Ours
was the first butchery to have a tiled floor that we washed every day. And
we put tiles on the walls.”
But it was the sophisticated way the Rietmanns
packaged and presented the products that opened Cape Town eyes. One early
photograph of the butchery shows a spectacular glass-fronted emporium in
which the hanging legs of lamb and looped sausages are as carefully
arranged and lit as designer outfits in a Paris boutique. A world-class
food store. But heaven knows what today’s twitchy consumers would make
of that waxy row of neatly stretched out suckling pigs on the front
counter, smiling as sweetly as contestants in a beauty pageant.
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In 1982, to celebrate the Rietmanns’ 25 years
in business, the Argus brought out an eight-page advertising supplement.
Just about everyone in the meat industry took an ad. Excited editorials on
every page reported on the success of the Rietmann enterprises—which by
then also had butcheries in Stuttafords Cavendish Square and Stuttafords
in the city centre, Kloof Street.
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To mark the occasion, Kurt junior’s wife
Jeanette wrote an elegantly illustrated cookery book that introduced local
housewives to unfamiliar Continental meat cuts like Berner Platter (veal
knuckle) and Tessiner Braten (pork roll). Jeanette, a dynamo whose
mother’s family was French, had been brought into the family business as
a food stylist but was soon doing the company’s marketing.
By the nineties Rietmanns Butchery had hit a
speed wobble, forced by the growth of the supermarket chains to close
their branches. Renown was now a major player in deli-processed meats.
They realised the value Rietmanns could add to their brand, but the merger
failed and Rietmanns was forced into liquidation in 1994.
Kurt junior took up a position he was offered
handling the Woolworths division of Enterprise, while Jeanette became
involved in the sales and marketing of Hartlief meat products from
Namibia. She later set up her own company, Basilia, distributing Rietmann
products, among others, to the major chains.
Her husband was determined however not to give
up on the Rietmann legacy. In 1999, shortly before the Enterprise factory
closed and relocated to Gauteng, Kurt left and opened Rietmanns EuroDeli
in Ottery. He brought his son Paul into the business from Backsberg Wine
Estate where he was running a small meat processing operation.
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The meat industry was an inevitable choice for
Paul. “When I was two I was helping my parents put up the Christmas
decorations in the Woodstock shop,” he says. “Twenty years later,
after studying food technology, I did my practical in service training in
Zurich and Churwalden, working in the big meat processing company owned by
the family who’d bought our family’s shop in St Gallen.”
Following tradition, Paul persuaded his wife
Glynis, a Xhosa teacher, to join the family business and handle quality
and hygiene issues. “In this industry, an un-sanitised set-up is a time
bomb waiting to go off,” Paul tells me as I put on the compulsory
hygienic outfit, and follow him and Glynis into their scrupulously clean,
Swiss-style operation. A sign asking whether you’ve washed your hands
glares out accusingly from the wall behind the sausage-maker who’s busy
at the filler.
I’m expecting to see lots of blood and
carcases. There are none. Paul gets his meat de-boned, trimmed and lean,
for processing into deli specialities, which are then pre-packed under
strict supervision. He sells fresh cuts only in the little factory shop
next door.
“The market we’re catering for is
specialised—shoppers who are learning about more European food from the TV
food channels, and want to eat Carpaccio and Pancetta and Parma Ham, and
smoked meats like chicken and turkey. People have become more
sophisticated. They don’t want plastic meat any more. They want a proper
Gypsy Ham made from a whole leg of pork, not a sandwich incorporating
trimmings, turkey meat and cereal.”
The cold rooms are full of packaged meat ready
to be transported by Jeanette’s distribution company. Having reinvented
themselves, the Rietmanns are cooking...
Will either of the descendants of this long line
of butchers—Samantha, 12, and Andrew, 10—follow in the family
tradition? Who knows? They both enjoy working the factory’s vacuum pack
machine, so maybe St Gallen Bratwurst will be around for a while yet at
the toe of Africa.
Photography and Styling by Christoph and Diane
Heierli
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Jeanette
Rietmann gives SHOWCOOK the inside story on just how to
prepare succulent sausages, a divine potato salad and the
Swiss answer to the Ploughman's lunch.
Enjoy!
BUNDNER
TELLER
The Swiss
answer to the English Ploughman's Lunch. This selection of air dried and
smoked meats as well as local cheeses and pickles is traditionally served
on a rustic platter or wooden board and is a great favourite on the
sundrenched terraces overlooking the ski slopes. It is always
accompanied by fresh country style bread and local red wine - Dole.
These can be prepared
individually or for the table. Allow a slice or two of the following air
dried and smoked meats per person; Rietmanns Blackforrest Ham, Smoked
Beef, Air dried Italian style Salami as well as Smoked Salami. Serve
with a wedge of Gruyère, Bergekaesse or Emmenthaler cheese and add gherkins, olives, tomato slices and
served with a grated celery salad.
You can
include Italian air dried meats such as Pancetta, Coppa,
and Milano salami.
SUCCULENT
SAUSAGES
To begin with
you never boil a sausage, they should be warmed in hot, not boiling
water (70ºC is fine) for 5 to 10 mins depending on the thickness of the
sausage. All our sausages are
filled in natural casings. This prevents the sausage skin from bursting
and is quite warm enough to eat. It
is also a good idea to warm sausages before grilling for the same
reason. If you intend leaving the sausages to warm over a longer period
add 1 tsp of salt for every 1 lt water.
Many of our smoked
sausages are delicious on the braai if warmed as described and carefully
scored on both sides by making 1 cm slit with a sharp knife three times
along the length and grilled gently over glowing coals until warmed
through.
Try Bockwurst, Jumbo
Frankfurters Debreciener Curry Grillers or Chorizo to add a new dimension
to your braai.
BRATWURST
Our Bratwurst is a
cooked sausage and needs delicate handling. Warm gently in hot water for
10 minutes and carefully score the skin on both side by making a 1 cm
slit with a sharp knife three times along the length. Grill over glowing
coals until lightly golden. It is traditionally served with lashings of
fried onions and a dollop of mustard on a crispy white roll by street
vendors and at fairs. It is equally delicious served plated with a
German Potato Salad some dill pickles and sweet mustard. Allow 1 sausage
per person more for those with a big appetite.
JEANETTE'S
POTATO SALAD
10 - 12 potatoes,
boiled and peeled
125 ml mayonnaise - home made if possible or a good bottled brand
125 ml sour cream
15 ml prepared mustard
1 large gherkin, finely diced
1 onion, finely diced
250 g Rietmanns streaky bacon - crisply grilled, drained and crumbled
1 - 2 hard boiled eggs, roughly grated
Slice potatoes into
½ cm rings and gently combine with dressing ingredients gherkin and
onions. Turn into serving bowl and sprinkle with crumbled bacon and
grated boiled egg.
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