South Africa's savory Cape Malay cuisine is starting to gain the recognition it deserves. Edward Robbins provides the insider's culinary guide
The evening I go to Woodstock, near the heart of Cape Town, Table Mountain is on fire. Parched vegetation that ignited during the hot summer's day is now being fanned furiously by The Doctor, the city's infamous southeaster. Devil's Peak is haloed in orange, people on the sidewalk are riveted by the blaze, and cars career down Roodebloem Road so fast that their tails could be burning. The atmosphere is charged, as if revolution were in the air, which makes it perfect for what we are about to do: eat.
In Emily's Bistro, the decor catches my eye before the à la carte even has a chance. Numerous modern pieces by local artists cover the walls, themselves an oeuvre painted in the primary colors of the new South African flag. The menu is filled with Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, and Asian words, while the ingredients are even more of a culinary grab bag, from ostrich ravioli to veld mushrooms to putu (an African maize staple) to something doused in Kalahari Thirstland liqueur. Geographically and culturally, it's all over the place, although owner Peter Veldsman leaves no doubt about the number one influence: Cape Malay.
It's a lot to digest, and the appetizer hasn't even arrived at the table yet. When it does, it's an iced tomato and chili soup, along with a putu croquette, baked sweet pepper cream, and witblits, a famous local schnapps whose name translates loosely as "white lightning." The liqueur has been added, one could argue, to give a jolt to anyone who fails to be struck by the menu.
Not long ago, you see, the phrase South African cuisine was as much an oxymoron as Australian cuisine, except that what was a braai to one was a barbie to the other. When Sydney burst onto the international food scene a decade ago, South Africa was left behind in barbecue limbo. Until now, that is. Infected with the spirit of a new democracy, a number of restaurants (not many in this pasta- and pizza-saturated country, but enough) are suddenly taking notice of their heritage—influ-ences and flavors that have been around for years, even centuries.
Jockeying for position are the fiery peri-peri sauces, from the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, next door; chilies, down from West Africa in the form of harissa; and flaming curries introduced by the Indians who arrived at the sugar plantations of Natal as indentured laborers in the late 1800s. Last, but by no means least, there is the wonderful cornucopia of aromatic spices of the Cape Malays.
"It's a taste all it's own," Veldsman says of Cape Malay food. "One can't relate it to another cuisine . . . spicy with an element of sweetness." Garth Stroebel, the most talked-about chef in South Africa, says that up to half of the dishes at the acclaimed Cape Colony Restaurant at Cape Town's Mount Nelson Hotel have a Cape Malay influence. Dinner, therefore, might begin with a fried bobotie wonton and tomato salsa, move on to a springbok loin marinated in coriander, and end with a macerated-gooseberry brûlée and a syrupy koeksister.
"It's a robust taste," Veldsman says. "There's nothing bland about it, and it will play more of a major role in international cuisine." His conclusion echoes a sentiment I hear expressed often across the tables of Cape Town: "There's no country with as exciting a culinary revolution."
The term Cape Malay—or just Malay, for short—is actually a misnomer. Very broadly, it refers to the descendants of slaves and political exiles, mostly from Indonesia and Bengal, who were brought to the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Dutch East India Company. They spoke the trader language of Malayu, which led them to be called Malays and, later, Cape Malays. (Nor was that the end of it. During the apartheid years, a Cape Malay who converted from Islam to Christianity would suddenly find himself reclassified a Cape Colored.)
In the colonial kitchens, they pepped and peppered up bland Dutch recipes with condiments from the East, which had arrived on ships making their way back to Holland. Before long, the gabled Cape Dutch villas reeked of masala and cardamom and tamarind—in the meat dishes and stews called bredies, boboties, and denningvleis—while the reception rooms literally overflowed with Eastern artifacts and porcelain.
"By 1750," says Veldsman, "the dishes had gotten their hottest. When the British took over [in 1806], however, they tempered things. They didn't like their food so fiery." Nevertheless, Scotch eggs were transformed into kabobs, and shepherd's pie got some much-needed oomph in the guise of sabanangvleis. "So we had a century of spice, a century of tempered, and then, in the twentieth century, there was war and everything that went with it."
Veldsman segues effortlessly between cuisine and civics. The smell of coriander, ginger, and tamarind might be in the air today, rather than that of the cordite and petrol bombs of a decade ago, but politics has never been far from the kitchen table. In South Africa, the two overlap like the closely layered leaves of a waterblommetjie, the water lily originally used by the Khoisan, who were living on the cape when the Dutch arrived, and then taken up by the Cape Malays to flavor their lamb bredie, a style of cooking in which the meat is braised without liquid. That dish, along with numerous others (most infamously, the spiced mincemeat and custard bobotie), was later hijacked by the Afrikaners to become boerekos—Boer food.
"Isn't it ironic," reflects Cass Abrahams, the driving force behind the renaissance in Cape Malay cooking and author of The Culture and Cuisine of the Cape Malay. "At the height of apartheid, Afrikaners were claiming bobotie to be the archetypal Afrikaner dish, when its roots were actually with the Malays."
Outsiders might find it hard to imagine cuisine being a casualty of apartheid, but it was. When families and communities were forcibly uprooted and split, and racial groups were kept apart by law, traditional eating patterns changed, recipes were lost, and the natural fusion that would have taken place didn't. Most restaurants were off-limits to people of color—not even the fact that the Cape Malays" mother tongue was Afrikaans, the language of the white ruling class, earned them any exemptions—and flavors seldom traveled far. Curries stayed in the north, Cape Malay spices in the south, and, in a nation thus divided, steak and beer reigned supreme.
As did misconceptions. When I was a child, I thought sosatie was the Afrikaans word for savory kabobs, bobotie for the traditional dish my aunt cooked on the farm on holidays, blatjang for the fruity chutney we poured over it, and koeksister for the syrupy, braided confection that you just couldn't get enough of. I was wrong on all four counts. The words might have been assimilated into Afrikaans, but their origins were Malay, Malay, Malay, and Malay.
Not all recipes were coveted at the master's table. Just as bobotie was co-opted and became, according to Veldsman, "a white dish," denningvleis remained plata non grata. "It was seen as slave food," says Abrahams, "kitchen food." In an irony that isn't lost on today's most innovative chefs, denningvleis has at last come into its own and is featured on the menus of restaurants such as the Cape Malay Restaurant at Cape Town's five-star Cellars-Hohenort.
Never having eaten denningvleis before, I find myself being served the dish twice in a matter of days. Each time, it is prepared in a very different way, showing how local chefs are looking into the past for what is best and taking those elements forward. One meal is cooked in the traditional manner by Abrahams, while the other is given a modern riff by Veldsman.
Veldsman and Abrahams represent two sides of the revolution that's going on in South African cuisine today. He updates old dishes, with Cape Malay being one of numerous indigenous influences he uses. Abrahams cooks only Cape Malay.
Friends and often collaborators on books and TV programs, they have a piquant chemistry: She sometimes calls him Die Hollander, a barb at his European ancestry; he has on his menu a dish dedicated to her, a cassoulet of cabbage and sheep's brains called Cass-so-lay. What the one has in experience (he counts Wolfgang Puck among his friends), the other more than makes up for in unbridled enthusiasm. Says Abrahams: "I want to do for Cape Malay cuisine what Paul Prudhomme did for Cajun."
Curiously enough for someone who has become the voice of traditional Cape Malay cooking, in which many of the dishes are prepared for Muslim holy days and festivities, Abrahams is not a Cape Malay. She was born a Christian of German and Xhosa ancestors, among others, in faraway Johannesburg—home more to Indian curries and Portuguese peri-peris than to her cuisine of choice.
When she moved to Cape Town and married Yusuf Abrahams, her culinary repertoire consisted strictly of macaroni and cheese. Before long, though, she found herself immersed in a subculture rich in food and eating. "People who could cook received a lot of respect," she says. The only problem was learning how. The other women were loath to pass on recipes to anyone but family, an inclination that bore a direct relationship to their political suppression. It was a case, you might say, of the hand that fed, having been bitten, biting back.
Cape Malay womenfolk silently sabotaged any attempt—usually by whites—to put together an indigenous cookbook. Whenever they did give out a recipe, it would invariably lack a key ingredient. That's why you will find that, say, the potato pudding described in Hilda Gerber's Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays, for a long time a cooking bible among whites, fails to include a crucial ingredient—milk. "It comes out like scrambled eggs," says Abrahams with a naughty smile.
Her own learning process involved long stretches of sitting in the kitchen of Yusuf's grandmother, purposely talking about anything under the African sun except cooking—"just in case they suspected me of poaching"—and patiently watching what was going on. "I stole recipes with my eyes."
When Abrahams entered mainstream cooking, it was, quite appropriately, because of politics. As a teacher during the tumultuous '80s, she regularly found herself going off to prison to bail out pupils who'd been jailed for demonstrating at political rallies. During a leave of absence necessitated by burnout, she took a job with an American rice company, which was obliged by the U.S. Sullivan Code of the time to employ a certain number of nonwhites.
Part of Abrahams's new job was to visit supermarkets and show customers how to cook dishes that used rice as an ingredient. To her, the choice of cuisine was self-evident: Cape Malay. Today, she divides her time between running her own spice factory—where she blends blatjangs, chutneys, masalas, and atchars—and cooking for parties that include guests such as Nelson Mandela ("he likes breyani, a spicy rice dish with meat or vegetables, and tomato bredie") and for groups of foreigners, including the Friends of the Guggenheim ("they called Cape Malay food the best-kept secret in South Africa").
The day I eat with Cass and Yusuf Abrahams, it's at their home on the Cape Flats, the vast sandy plain to which people of color were moved en masse from places like Woodstock and District Six in the 1960s. Lots of residents want to move back to their former neighborhoods—especially now that they can live anywhere and the land they were evicted from is still vacant—although Abrahams isn't one of them. I can't see why at first, but then I notice the signs of community that have grown there. When she runs out of bay leaves, she leans across the fence and calls to her neighbor, who hands her a bushel. Afterward, she turns to me: "Where would I be able to do that in the city?"
For lunch, she prepares a chicken curry and something else that I had always thought of as Afrikaans, smoorsnoek, a bacalao-like dish that is, in fact, the traditional meal eaten by Muslim men when they trim the house at midnight before a wedding. Abrahams says she would also have made me a bredie, but that it was about two weeks too early for waterblommetjies, her preferred flavoring for the dish.
She prepares the smoorsnoek with peppercorns, allspice, and cloves, the trio of spices also used as a foundation for bredies and, in fact, most Cape Malay dishes. But that's only the beginning. Watching Abrahams add cumin, bay leaves, ginger, and barishap (fennel) to the various dishes as if she were bestowing gifts, I recall the words of Johan Odendaal, the chef at Emily's: "If you cook Cape Malay, you have to understand spices. Some people put in four, but Cass puts in sixteen—and then she adds a masala." Says Abrahams, "The layers of spices make it flavorsome, not so hot."
The main ingredients of the smoorsnoek are usually potatoes and snoek (a local game fish like barracuda), but Abrahams adds shredded cabbage to give me an idea of how, in the olden days, poor people who couldn't afford a lot of fish would bulk it up. As she talks, I peruse the photos on the wall of her living room, of her children and a grandmother who bears an uncanny resemblance to Josephine Baker.
Slowly my senses are diverted by a wonderful aroma filling the house, and I realize that it's our third main dish, denningvleis. The word is a combination of Malayu and Afrikaans that means "buffalo meat," though lamb has long been substituted as the main ingredient. Abrahams cooks it without fanfare, letting it simmer slowly in the pot until the meat is coated in a thick, almost peanut butter–like sauce that's sweet and sour and rich in flavor. It is a world away from the denningvleis that I will eat at Emily's the night Table Mountain is burning, which is brought to the table in a small tower coated in pumpkin seeds, a design of sauce artfully dribbled on the plate. Veldsman explains that the lamb was cooked, taken off the bone, and flaked; the fat was removed; and then the meat was revived with stock. He says this is healthier than the traditional method.
However, gone too, besides the fat, are the sensations of Abrahams's kitchen, the magic of having the spices collect around you, tantalize you, before you savor them. More intoxicating at Emily's are the wonderful ironies. I have eaten not only traditional Cape Malay food with a converted Muslim woman who lives in the new part of town but also nouvelle Cape Malay food with a white man whose restaurant is in an old part of town from which the very people whose recipes inspire him were once banished. The dinner tables have turned, and the fusion that politics stood in the way of for so long is at last taking place. As with so many aspects of the new South Africa, the result is wonderful to behold, but in this case even better to taste.
Written as Edward Robbins
View original article online at Condé Nast Traveler (October 2002)
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