The owner of the farm, an elderly English bachelor called Peter Vining, employed my widowed mother as a housekeeper for a year after she emigrated from Kenya in 1971 with my two elder brothers and me. Tom was trained as a teenager in the 1950s by his own father in an African farm kitchen, managed according to upper-class British sensibilities. It’s been one of my most enduring food memories, and a method I’ve wanted to learn ever since. Smoky, succulent, fall-off-the-bone meat served with guava jelly and roast potatoes. Earlier in our relationship, when I began conjuring up recipes using wild food, I’d told Chris about a roast leg of pork Tom had cooked in a hole in the ground while on safari with my parents in the 1980s. It was my partner, Chris, who suggested I invite Tom to our farm in the Zambezi Valley to teach me all he knew about cooking in the bush. Tom had traveled by bus all the way from the rural area in which I grew up in Zimbabwe Adelina was my Zambian sous chef.

I’d asked both of them to help me cook an outdoor gourmet lunch, set amongst a resident herd of orphaned and rescued elephants. Adelina has lived in Livingstone near the Zambezi River for much of her life. Tom repositioned the site for his oven next to Adelina Banda’s mbaula, a small charcoal-filled metal brazier. “We have an eighteen-foot resident crocodile living near there. “I think your oven may be a little too close to the water,” she warned. Slightly stooped, a well-worn white uniform flapping loose on his thin frame, Tom concentrated on measuring the hole exactly, using black sisal string, but was interrupted by Clover, a manager at Zambezi Elephant Trails, who’d watched him with a look of concern. Tom Chavakho, his salt-and-pepper hair hidden under a modish felt trilby, bent down slowly to mark out the piece of ground he’d dug for his bush oven using the sharp end of his jamba. Ultimate Guide to Fruits and Vegetables.

Gluten Free Slow Cooker by F.L. Clover