Catch in the Kitchen: Emma Barbieri
She’s a scion of the retailing Ackerman family but a food force to be reckoned with in her own right
*Note: Raymond Ackerman died a few hours after this story was published. The interview below was conducted a week before.
It is only the second time Emma Barbieri has made this chocolate pear cake so she’s had to cast her mind back to how she came up with it in the first place. “I have a habit of making things up as I go,” she says.
The cake made its debut at a Pick n Pay board meeting lunch. The retail chain is the second largest in South Africa. As Emma was setting everything up, the chocolate sauce she had made to go with the cake splattered all over the back wall of the boardroom.
This time there’s no sauce, which is just as well. The average boardroom wall could probably do with a splash or two of liquid chocolate. The picture-perfect Nancy Meyers-style kitchen at home where Emma is setting things up this time, not so much.
“Richard (former Pick n Pay chief executive Richard Brasher) very kindly offered for me to cook for the company. My dad had said, Emma’s started catering and he had said, why don’t we get her to cater? So it was very kind of Richard. I mean, I was a start-up, I didn’t really do much catering. I had a few loyal people who used me a lot for cocktail parties and dinners. I did twenty-firsts and I did a wedding.”
Emma’s dad is Pick n Pay chairman, Gareth Ackerman, who is the eldest of Pick n Pay founder Raymond and Wendy Ackerman’s four children. “Sometimes I’ll say to him, what do you want for lunch?” Emma says of Gareth. “And he’ll say something and I’m, like, that’s ridiculous, and then I do something else,” she laughs.
“Every now and then, Joy (Joy Trout, PA to current CEO Pieter Boone) will send me a message and say, let’s have beef this time. But, literally, it’s just as vague as ‘let’s have beef’. They’re trusting so I can just do what I want; I’m very lucky that there’s no specifics. I typically do a DIY sort of spread to cater for all the dietaries: fish, meat, chicken and salads to make your own, or have a bit of this and a bit of that. There’s always a cheeseboard and a pudding.
“So it’s the same sort of formula, but I try and mix it up as much as possible. Just because it’s in a boardroom doesn’t mean it needs to be a corporate meal. It’ll be the same sort of love and passion that goes into it. I use fresh ingredients and I make my own dressings. I haven’t done it for a while, but I always used to do fresh focaccia. I used to have so much more time,” she says, alluding to her workdays before she had children.
Emma, 35, is the middle child of three. Both of her brothers “know how to cook and can cook quite well”. Their grandmother on their mother’s side, Rosalie, is “a very good cook” while their other grandmother, Wendy, is “not the best cook in the world but she makes the best chicken soup in the world. But that’s about it that she can make, I joke with her.” Emma uses Wendy’s recipe for chicken soup and her great grandmother’s recipe for matzo balls and combines them.
“On Saturday mornings, sometimes my dad would take us with him into the office and then we’d go do store visits and it was always the highlight because he’d buy us a sausage roll and my mum wouldn’t let us have sausage rolls.” When she wasn’t on store visits, childhood weekends were spent helping her mom, Mandy, at the kitchen counter with the preparation of “delicious, simple, homestyle” family meals.
“I’m sort of in awe of her. Everything she does, it’s almost like she’s waved a magic wand and it’s just beautiful. I aspire to be as incredible as her and for my daughters to see me in the same light, maybe, one day.”
One of Emma’s early sous-chef forays for her mom was mixing the eggs for scrambling. “I think when I was about eight, I was making the scrambled eggs for Sunday breakfast with the family. So I’ve loved cooking always.” Now Emma’s elder daughter helps out, choosing the flour as her prized ingredient – or “powder”, as she calls it – as much going on her body as in the baking.
The stand mixer on Emma’s kitchen counter has been droning on for an inordinately long time – a kitchen aid that is certainly no friend to the interview recording device. “So that’s one of the biggest mistakes people make when they mix butter and sugar. You need to beat it until light and fluffy and doubled in size and it really makes a big difference to your cake.
“Often recipes will say ‘cream your butter and sugar’ and then people just sort of mix it till it’s mixed together. But ideally what you should be doing is actually mixing until you can’t even feel the sugar grains in it anymore. In South Africa, our sugar is much coarser than it is in France, so it’s very difficult to get that texture. And then the other thing is when you’re adding your eggs in, you have to put the egg in one at a time and beat it, and that really, really helps with the texture of your cake.”
Mandy is good friends with the caterer Annalize Buchanan and when Emma was 13, she would help out with functions on weekends. “She’s in my opinion the best caterer in Cape Town. She was so incredible and I learned so much from her. Whenever she was stressed or upset about something, she would step away, take a deep breath, put her lipstick on and say Right! and she would come back. Nothing is a disaster – there’s always a way to fix it – and that’s something I learned from her.”
During Emma’s subsequent undergraduate degree studies at Stellenbosch University, politics, history and international relations didn’t quite capture her imagination to the same extent as catering. So during exam time, instead of studying, she’d be whipping up frozen meals and selling them. “I called myself ‘Hungry Maties’. I would make tubs of soup and lasagnes, pasta bakes. I had a lot of farmer friends and they would tell their mums and their mums would phone me and say, get my son 10 meals!”
Not wanting to do another multi-year academic programme, such as the three-year qualification offered at local cookery school Silwood, she enrolled simultaneously in the basic, intermediate and superior courses in cuisine and patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu. “I was lucky enough that my father helped me do that, so I did the full thing. They call it the Grand Diplôme.”
During the first class, she and her classmates only chopped vegetables. In fact, they weren’t allowed to use any sort of electrical equipment until the last two months of the course. Batter was whisked by hand for cakes, pastry hand blended, hollandaise sauce hand mixed: all in the pursuit of understanding how the food is supposed to look and feel. “So that’s one of the things you learn about the texture of the butter and the sugar,” she notes.
Certainly knowing how to do things by hand comes in useful during South Africa’s frequent and ongoing power cuts. “They help you, they guide you, and they push you,” she recounts of her teachers at Le Cordon Bleu. “It was six days a week. That’s what the industry is like so I suppose they’re teaching you from an early age.”
Outside of school she explored restaurants and markets with her classmates, including a 3am session at the Billingsgate Fish Market. “I met some lovely, lovely people from all over the world and it was so much fun to go and do these things with people who were foodies. At one point there was somebody in our class who lived in Portugal, and we went and spent a holiday with him and his family there.”
Her first kitchen job in London after graduating was at famed celebrity magnet The Ivy, where she worked in the pastry team. “I wasn’t there for very long, stupidly. There was an opportunity that came up to go and do an internship at this cake company called Peggy Porschen. It’s a very famous cake shop; I think they did Princess Catherine’s wedding cake.
“So this internship position came up and I applied for it and basically I got the wrong end of the stick. I thought I’d got it, so I left the job at The Ivy and actually I didn’t get it, so then I was out of a job and out of the internship. But because I’d had The Ivy on my CV, I was able to get another job and I worked at this really cool Italian restaurant called Zucca. Because it was a smaller kitchen, there was a lot more responsibility. When you’re commis chef, you’re at the bottom of the pile in those big restaurants so you don’t do much. But, at Zucca, I was able to do a bit of everything so I learned a lot there.”
After that she went to a start-up Mexican-fusion eatery called Peyote, run by an Israeli head chef and her Slovakian husband sous-chef. “They had a lot of trust in me and I never understood how, why. I went from being at a very basic entry level to helping run the kitchen, and run the pass, in a very short space of time. So I learned a lot about the runnings of kitchens. We had the most unbelievable team; it was so much fun. A lot of the guys were from Mexico, there were some Italian girls, there was this Hungarian couple, and it was just a really good atmosphere.”
Following that was a stint as a pastry sous-chef at one of Jamie Oliver’s premium restaurants, Barbecoa, where she also helped out on the magazines and a couple of the books. “I didn’t have a huge amount of interaction with him but I had interactions with the people who report directly to him. It was also a lovely place to work; it was fun.
“But at that stage I was absolutely shattered. I would get in in the morning in the kitchen at half past six, seven. I would open the kitchen and basically close the kitchen if I was on a double shift. I used to leave at 1 in the morning and then it was an hour on the bus home. The earliest would be 11 at night. If I was on a single shift I would leave at 4pm, but it was mostly double shifts. So I was just broken. I was so exhausted.”
Feeling “done” with restaurants, she enlisted to cook during peak week ski seasons in Switzerland and in a castle in Scotland “in the middle of nowhere”. The latter job was for a family in their summer home, where she worked alongside a South African friend she had met at Le Cordon Bleu. Her friend’s family had a flat in Paris which afforded weekend getaways as well as other “crazy little adventures” to Beaujolais and Bordeaux. She also worked with her now husband during one of her stints in Switzerland: she as chalet chef, he as chalet manager.
While living in London she did dinner parties for clients who wanted multi-course meals. “But I didn’t really like doing it and in London it was very difficult because I didn’t have a car, so I had to prep everything in my kitchen and at that stage my kitchen was literally this size,” she says, spanning her arms just wider than the length of her Smeg oven. “In order to open the fridge, I had to close the door. So I was cooking for thirty people in this tiny little kitchen and then I would cart it all off in a taxi or in an Uber to the function and then pack it all up and Uber home.”
When she and her husband, Domenico Barbieri, got engaged and subsequently settled in Cape Town, she started catering parties under the moniker of Emma’s Dillemma (spelled with two l’s like the herb dill). “But with the girls it’s so difficult, so now I’m trying to push into the food styling/social media side of it. It’s just because the hours are better.” To that end she’s been assisting a food stylist friend on shoots to “learn the ropes” and doing some content creating for social media.
Domenico, like many of his Italian compatriots, comes from a home where there was a lot of passionate cooking taking place. “His grandmother was a phenomenal cook and his father was a chef and his mother loved home cooking. And he always tells me the stories of his father and his mother standing in the kitchen shouting at each other because his father has an idea of doing it and his mother has an idea of doing it,” she recalls.
Since Dom, as she calls him, grew up helping out in the kitchen too, he and Emma share cooking duties at home. “He forbade me from cooking pasta. I once overcooked the pasta and it was like the world had come to an end.” She relays another anecdote of a cooking fail, this time about one of their daughters: “The other day she says to me: mum, I really want tomato soup. So I make her roasted tomatoes and olive oil and basil and I stuck a carrot in there. No, mum. Don’t like this one. I want the one in the packet. All she likes is Pick n Pay packet tomato soup.”
Ninety-eight percent of the time, Emma says, she shops at Pick n Pay. “I will only go to . . .” she says, pausing, “ . . . the W shop – can’t even say it in our house – if I’m absolutely desperate. I’ve never in my life bought anything from Checkers or stepped into a Checkers. I walked into the Checkers at the (Constantia) Emporium for the first time the other day because there’s a Kauai in there, and I stopped to get a smoothie for my daughter. My card was declined and I thought, they’re watching me!”
She has relayed to her father items she feels are missing from the stores, such as convenience meals for kids. “My point is I get upset when I can buy things at other shops and why is it not at Pick n Pay? So I’ll go and do some secret shopping and I’ll take photos and I’ll send them to my dad: look, they’ve got it here.”
Despite her many culinary accomplishments, having a South African business icon for a grandfather and belonging to a family that’s become a household name in the country can be a double-edged sword. “I was definitely aware of it,” she says of Ackerman’s reputation, while she was growing up. “And people would always say, oh my gosh, do you know who that is? That’s Emma Ackerman, Raymond Ackerman’s granddaughter. And even still today, which I find very annoying; I really hate it. That’s why I was very excited to change my surname when I got married.
“I mean, yes, it’s amazing having the name because it can get you places but also people, the minute they hear, you can see it, people’s perceptions. The way they treat you, the way they talk to you changes, and I find it very, very frustrating.”
She credits Raymond and Wendy for cultivating an ethos of family togetherness and she endeavours to see them every weekend, if not for Friday night dinner then for a cup of tea on Sunday morning. “Even now I’ll go chat to him and ask him questions and he’s always a fountain of knowledge and information. What I love is hearing his story because those are the things that once he’s gone, that’s gone. So not so much advice but listening to him and asking him: how did he feel when certain things happened or what was his reaction. And one of the things he always asks me is, are the young people staying or are they going?
“He’s so passionate about standing strong because he fought so hard in apartheid. When everyone was leaving he was, like, no we are staying, we believe in our country. And he’s so adamant that our generation feels the same.”
Before Emma and Dom decided to set up home in South Africa, not wanting to stay in London anymore and unsure whether to relocate to Italy, she had suggested they give it five years in Cape Town and then reassess.
For him, as a wine commercial operations manager at Pick n Pay and occasional surfer, the Western Cape’s highly developed wine industry and no shortage of ocean to surf are two of the big draws. For her, as a professional chef, avid home cook and mother, the availability of help with children and glorious local produce.
As an example, she mentions one of her farmer friends from Stellenbosch experimenting with recently award-winning new and different varieties of stone fruit that have never before been seen in South Africa. “You look at the economy in the UK. In America and Europe there are big issues. We have big issues but I think the life you live here makes up for the issues.”
Find Emma on Instagram and TikTok
Emma’s pear & almond chocolate cake
120g butter
120g castor sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
200g self-raising flour
100g ground almonds
2 TBs cocoa powder
20ml milk
2 pears pealed and sliced
• grease and line a loaf tin with baking parchment and preheat the oven to 180•C
• in an electric mixer or with a whisk, beat the sugar, butter and vanilla together until light and fluffy
• add the eggs one at a time, mixing until well incorporated before adding the next one
• sieve the cocoa, flour and almonds together; then add into the egg and butter mixture, with the milk. Beat slowly until it just comes together.
• pour into the lined baking tin and smooth the surface, stick the sliced pears in all the way along the length of the cake
• bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean when poked and pulled out
• allow to cool before removing from the tin and serve with ice cream, cream or yoghurt and some chocolate sauce (optional)
Happy baking xxxx @emmasdillemma
From the archive
Published in the Cape Times on June 12, 2009
Learning to cook has long been on my to-do list and since I recently moved into an apartment with every kitchen mod con (to use estate agent speak), now was the time to do it. So I enlisted the help of my talented chef friend Sophia Lindop to augment the rather pathetic and odd assortment of kitchen utensils I have accumulated over the years.
I discovered once we started going through the list of desirable items any kitchen should have why I had yet to cook anything that wasn’t pasta. I simply did not have the required tools. From hearing about paring knives and tagine pots to sauté pans and slotted spoons, I realised that I have been wildly ill-equipped. A wok – the one item I did have – was now useless since my new stove was electric. This was rather alarming to learn considering stir-fries are one of the two things I can make.
The list of goodies I needed to become a culinary force to be reckoned with wound up being 28 items long, with things like a Granton Edge Santoku knife and Microplane on it. I can’t remember what each item does and I’m sure once they arrive I will stare at them much like the Bushman at the Coke can, but as the Boy Scout motto goes, “Be Prepared”, and prepared I am becoming.
Those with an inherent affinity for seasoning and blending probably don’t need all these yuppie chef type accoutrements, but I need all the help I can get. My recent forays into the kitchen have not been overwhelmingly successful. During a stint in London with family, one of my duties was to produce dinner. The morning after one rather pleasant collation, I emailed Trevor and Sarin, friends who lived nearby, as Sarin is a terrific cook. “I made scallops tonight, with stir-fried veggies and rice vermicelli noodles,” I wrote. “I must confess it was all done with the gigantic aid of Marks & Spencer but, still, scallops! I mean, surely that is impressive for a cooking neophyte like me?”
Feeling quite pleased with myself, I then attempted a recipe that I had always enjoyed at my parents: a vegetarian chickpea stew. That, too, was quite nice and came as somewhat of a surprise – that I was capable of making a dish from scratch that was faintly edible. Reckoning at this stage that I was possibly something of a cooking savant, I took a look at another recipe from home that appeared even simpler than the chickpea stew, figuring I could easily whip that up in the hour I had to spare before meeting friends for an early movie.
The bean frikkadels wound up being a complete balls-up, each one wholly uncooperative and falling apart the instant it made contact with the pan. Feeling quite hard done by that my turn as a kitchen goddess had been so short-lived, and in a move where I hoped my ingenuity would be rewarded, I stuck the batter in a pot and in the oven, hoping it would transform into a tasty legume stew. Tasty, not to mention visually appealing, it was not. But, as the expression goes, one can’t be sensational in every room in the house.
So, in addition to the purchase of an extensive array of cookware, I will be signing up for Sophia’s next round of cookery courses. Since one focuses on seafood, I know that at least my newly acquired fish turner will come in handy.
Dominique Herman is a freelance writer who would like to write more and cook less like Bridget Jones.