Obituary: Maggie Pepler: Cook who put malva pudding on SA's tables

1926-2013: Maggie Pepler, who has died in Stellenbosch at the age of 87, is the unsung hero of South Africa's most famous dessert, malva pudding. She did not exactly invent it, but without her, it is fair to say, there would be no malva pudding today.

She put it on the tables of households across the country and on the buffets and menus of the poshest restaurants in South Africa and the world.

Nobody who tasted her malva pudding ever forgot it. Oprah Winfrey flirted dangerously with it on one of her shows. Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger pronounced it the best dessert he had ever eaten.

Her recipe for this pudding has scored more hits on the web page of Getaway adventure magazine than any other topic, including bungee jumping and Kruger National Park kills.

Pepler was a brilliant, entirely self-taught cook who grew up in the farming community of Robertson in the Western Cape, where she was born on May 1 1926.

From an early age she read recipe books the way her friends read thrillers. After she had cooked one of her gourmet meals for them - grilled chops awash with fresh cherries and juice, pastries, pies with extraordinary fillings and other exotic dishes that, in South Africa certainly, were way ahead of their time - they tended to remain friends for life.

When her husband, a World War 2 veteran, died in the late 1960s, a well-connected friend got her a job as cook at the residence of the South African ambassador in London, Carel de Wet. He was a portly man and constantly imposed diets on the ambassadorial household, which she found immensely frustrating.

"Heaven arrived when he would come down to the kitchen and say: 'Mrs Pepler, I think we'll have malva pudding tonight,'" she said.

Later she cooked for the South African ambassador in Paris.

In the mid-1970s she went to work at the Lanzerac in Stellenbosch, which at the time was rated one of the top 300 hotels in the world. She cooked the staff lunch and a couple of puddings for the pudding buffet. One of them was her malva pudding.

In charge of the restaurant was cordon bleu chef and food and wine critic Michael Olivier. He was astonished by the effortless culinary skills of this understated, self-effacing widow with an earthy sense of humour, who lived in a converted Stellenbosch slave cottage where she tended her garden, studied spiders and got up early to gaze at the stars.

"Food seemed to come out of the tips of her fingers with consummate ease," he said. As for her malva pudding, he had never come across anything like it.

When he became public relations manager for Boschendal wine estate in 1978 and was responsible for its then-legendary restaurant, he asked Pepler to run the kitchen and teach the staff how to make malva pudding. It was an instant hit and has been on the buffet at Boschendal restaurant every day since then. Patrons asked for the recipe and "her" malva pudding began appearing on buffets and menus around the country.

Pepler said she got the recipe from her mother. It used to be called "telefoonpoeding" because farmers' wives would call each other up on the party line and read the recipe over the phone.

There are many versions of her recipe today, and ingredients such as banana, apple and even caramelised condensed milk are added. But hers is the benchmark.

Pepler is survived by two children.