Buried in the introduction of a Victorian-era Cape Colony cookbook is a piece of culinary wisdom that modern kitchens have spent the last two decades rediscovering — packaged as "Instant Pot slow mode" and "reverse-sear technique." Hildagonda Duckitt, writing from Wynberg near Cape Town in 1892, was blunt about what separated a competent kitchen from a mediocre one:

Simmering (to bring as near as possible to boiling without letting it boil) is one of the great difficulties. Cooks will not remember how much depends on slow cooking. Hashes, Curries, "Bredees," etc., etc., must simmer, fry the onion with the meat, a light brown ("smoor," as Cape cooks say).

Duckitt was a South African home cook who assembled recipes from "relations and friends, and from practical housewives" across the Cape, drawing especially on the Malay cooks whose techniques had blended Dutch, Indonesian, and Indian traditions over two centuries at the Cape of Good Hope. Her book — running to a fourth printing by 1892 — was one of the first to preserve Cape Malay cuisine in writing.

What is striking is how precisely she names two things that Western food science would not formally describe for another 70+ years:

• The sub-boil zone. Her definition of simmering as "to bring as near as possible to boiling without letting it boil" is essentially the 82–96°C window that Harold McGee would later identify as the sweet spot for collagen breakdown without protein toughening. She calls it a "great difficulty" — which it is, without a thermometer.
• The Maillard step. "Fry the onion with the meat, a light brown" — the technique of browning aromatics and proteins before the long simmer. The Maillard reaction wasn't described until 1912, and its role in flavor development wasn't well understood until the 1950s. Duckitt just says: do this, always, or your bredee will be flat.

The word smoor (Afrikaans/Dutch for "smother" or "braise") survives today in South African cooking — smoorsnoek, smoorvis — and is a direct linguistic cousin of the German schmoren. It describes exactly what any modern recipe means by "brown, deglaze, cover, and cook low."

What is forgotten is not the technique — every serious cook still does this. What is forgotten is that Duckitt was recording it as declining common knowledge in 1892. She complained that "few Colonial cooks of the present day understand the art of cooking" and that the lady of the house had to know these things "so that she can direct them." A century before Instant Pots and sous vide circulators, she was already lamenting that home cooks had lost the patience for slow cooking and needed a book to remind them.

Every "trust the process, don't rush the sear" TikTok is Hildagonda's ghost, still trying to teach us to smoor.