Get your greedy trunk off my warthog kebabs

'That tree is a malaria tree," whispers Dumi as we watch two giraffes munching contentedly. "Before there were pills, we would make a cure from it. And this, this is a mopane tree." "What does that cure?" I ask. Dumi laughs, he's a big happy man who used to be a park ranger before turning to cooking. "Have you never tried mopane worms? They feed on the leaves and when they fall off you dry them out, keep them for a year and cook them in ground nut stew. Very good!"

I think I'm being teased. We're supposed to be gathering herbs for a meal but Dumi and his assistant Lettuce are enjoying their break from the kitchen. Interpretive cooking safaris are a new venture at Ngala Game Reserve and the boys are making it up as they go along. It's getting very hot now as we stop to gather some fruit from the baobab tree on our way back to the kitchen garden. According to Dumi, the powder inside the fruit can be used like cream of tartar.

At the garden itself baby warthogs scatter. They've been trying to get in under the fence but the snails have beaten them to it, making dramatic inroads into the okra we're after, though I notice they've left the chillis alone. Lettuce holds up a white bleached shell, all that is left of one predator. It's huge, about the size of his hand.

But warthogs and snails are nothing compared with the damage that can be done by squirrels making a smash-and-grab raid on a buffet or a hyena hijacking the meat you've prepared for a barbecue, or, indeed, the impact of baboons on a laundry line of tablecloths.

The tales I've heard this morning make me realise that cooking in the bush is no easy business, even when you have a modern well-run kitchen like the one at Ngala. Deliveries take three and half hours from Nelspruit, and when Dumi runs out of ingredients he has to improvise. I had wondered about the warthog kebabs we'd eaten last night. Were those locally sourced? Dumi laughs at the idea. "This is an animal reserve. We can't kill anything here." Even so, I suggest, it must be tempting when you run short. Dumi shakes his head: "No way."

It's blazingly hot now but Dumi doesn't seem to notice. I, however, am sweating and keen to get back into the air-conditioned kitchen. As we pass the outhouses we duck under electric wires strung eight feet up across the courtyard. These are to keep elephants from raiding the storerooms.

My admiration for Dumi and Lettuce grows apace. I f ind it hard enough to cook at the best of times but I've never had to cope with killer snails, larcenous warthogs and ram-raiding pachyderms.

Inside the kitchen Lettuce rejoins my wife, Kate, who is laying out ingredients. I try not to react as two women in kitchen whites appear carrying supplies on their heads - but how can they walk around so nonchalantly with 40lb of flour up top? Dumi looks at what we have assembled and decides that the okra will make a side dish and the chillis can go into bobotie, the South African Malay dish that he already had in mind for tonight.

The one missing ingredient is apricot jam, but Lettuce remembers that they have plenty of Mrs Ball's Chutney. Amelia Ball really existed. In 1852 when the SS Quanza went down, her family was stranded in Fort Jackson en route to Australia. Mrs Ball restored the family fortunes by marketing her sweet chutney recipe which is made in Johannesburg to this day.

A lot of the food made at Ngala is South African as the majority of guests come from Johannesburg and Pretoria. Dumi himself comes from the local village of Utah. He is of the Shangani people who revolted against Shaka Zulu in 1819 and fled here to live along the Limpopo, but he knows that he must produce food that suits his guests. "When I serve sausage I always call it wors," he confides. "Guests from Johannesburg get very angry if you say sausage."

While Kate is preparing the bobotie - minced beef with a ferocious mix of garlic, curry powder, turmeric, lemon leaves, the baobab fruit and my chillis - I'm shown how to mix mealie pap. "You can make it many ways," says Dumi. "We Shangani use it like mashed potato; the Zulus make it with milk, and people who work in the mines have it stiff like biscuits."

"Do we need any more ingredients?" I ask. I'd rather not go out again. Dumi produces a paper bag of maize meal. "Today, you are in luck, my friend!"

FACT FILE

HOW TO GET THERE South African Airways (0870 747 1111; flysaa.com) offers return flights from Heathrow to Johannesburg from [pound]729. Rainbow Tours (020-7226 1004; rainbowtours.co.uk) offers six nights at Ngala Lodge and Tented Camp with walking and kitchen safaris from [pound]1,205 per person, based on two sharing, including light-aircraft transfers from Johannesburg.

Copyright 2007 Independent Newspapers UK Limited. All rights owned or operated by The Independent.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.