![]() It’s Miss Marple crossed with Julia Child.”įictional amateur sleuths are a dime a dozen, Olwagen remarked. She licks the countertop of Martine’s kitchen, she thinks about what was in her shopping basket. It’s quirky, fun and engaging.”ĭoyle Kennedy said she loved the way “Maria approaches everything - being an agony aunt, solving a murder - through food.” She added, “It’s a language for her, the way she communicates, how she slows time down in order to process thought and feeling. “It’s not an African country, struggling. The mix of characters and nuanced relationships in the small town “perhaps show a South Africa that many people haven’t really seen before,” Greeff said. (The letter writers speak directly into the camera, describing their problems as we see their lives.) ![]() “These women are so different, but they are a sisterhood.”ĭespite the murders and simmering racial undertones, the show keeps its warm, humorous tone through the quiet, grounded character of Maria, with her empathetic, practical advice - and recipes - in response to the letters she receives. The unfolding of the relationships between people of different races and from widely varied walks of life is “full of delicacy and truth,” said Steyn, who plays Hattie. Her first letter is from Martine Burger (Tinarie van Wyk Loots), a woman who is being abused by her husband despite placating him with Maria’s lamb curry recipe, Martine is found dead soon after. When the paper is forced to change its recipe column to an advice column, Maria volunteers to take it on, incorporating her recipes into her responses. But with darkness, too it wasn’t trivial.”Īt the start of “Recipes,” Maria is writing a cooking column for the local newspaper, whose staff comprises the smartly suited editor, Hattie (Jennifer Steyn), and an ambitious young reporter, Jessie (Kylie Fisher). “Here was something tender and warm, with very funny, even comedic setups. “I had read so much material that was violent, with so many serial killers and the many ways they dispose of women, that it was starting to make me angry,” she said. In a Zoom interview from Dublin, Doyle Kennedy (“Downton Abbey,” “Outlander”) said she loved the script so much when she first read it, that she persuaded her husband to film her “putting stuff in the oven, breaking up herbs, trying to look like I am a fantastic cook,” and then sent the footage as part of her audition tape. “Food, the Karoo landscape, a small-town social microcosm. “There were just so many interesting elements,” she said. Jeynes, who is also the head writer at the production company Both Worlds Pictures in Cape Town, said she and the company’s director, Thierry Cassuto, had been looking for South African books to adapt when they came across Andrew’s novels. “But for the show to exist we had to make an appeal to an international audience.” The rest of the cast and crew, she added, is entirely South African. “I know there are people who are disappointed that we didn’t use a South African actress,” Karen Jeynes, who wrote the script, said during a recent conversation at a seafront coffee spot here. But there is much that differs from the books, starting with the identity of Tannie Maria, who, in the novels, is South African in the TV series, she has a South African mother and a Scottish father, and grew up in Scotland before moving to a house in the Karoo, inherited from an aunt.
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