It didn't quite play out as intended, but that is the way of plans and reality. Here's what happened when your Food Editor was challenged to make a favourite recipe of a Karoo literary giant, supposedly having come to him from the poet Roy Campbell.

At dinner at our house in Cradock at the end of the recent Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée, my friend Anthony Akerman asked if I would accept a challenge: to make "Roy Campbell's bobotie" from a recipe that came to him from Guy Butler and his wife Jean. I accepted, and soon afterwards Anthony sent me the recipe.

Somehow I missed Roy Campbell, the poet and satirist, though I did once meet Guy Butler. Well, I would have missed Campbell, obviously -- he was born in 1901 and died in 1957, three days after my second birthday. Butler, as Anthony calls him in this piece, was born in 1918 and died in 2001, so we overlapped for two decades, although we only met on one day -- memorable for me, and surely forgettable for him.

I found myself side by side with Guy Butler in Grahamstown long before it became Makhanda. It was 1981 and...