The multi-hued streets of Cape Town's Bo-Kaap area are home to an equally vibrant cuisine, writes Adrian Darbishire.
On a perfect summer afternoon in suburban Cape Town, Cass Abrahams stands at the centre of her sun-drenched kitchen, absent-mindedly tossing vegetables and spices into a giant saucepan. She lives in the Bo-Kaap district, an unforgettable area of cobbled streets lined with 18th-century cottages and houses painted, not in the usual snow-blinding whitewash of much of Cape Town, but instead with an explosion of bright turquoise, lime green, yellow, lilac, cerise and pumpkin orange. The streets bustle with men in white robes selling vegetables, women in veils chatting in doorways, and children playing.
"You know, I don't actually have a single drop of Cape Malay blood in me," says Abrahams, somewhat surprisingly for a woman famous throughout South Africa as the queen of Cape Malay cooking. It is the distinctive culinary style native to Cape Town's vibrant Muslim community and Cass pops up constantly in the media, touting the cuisine's virtues and teaching its preparation. At government receptions for visiting heads of state, she often serves as chef; she even has a range of spices that bears her name.
Not only has she written two best-selling cookbooks, her literary endeavours have achieved an even rarer kind of stature. "In the year my first cookbook came out," Cass explains with a proud smile, "it was the second most-frequently stolen book from South Africa's bookstores." And the first? "Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom."
At the age of 52, Cass is a handsome woman with an easy, expansive manner. In her modest home in the slightly tumbledown Bo-Kaap neighbourhood known as Retreat, she is talking about food with passion, force, and no small amount of humour. Her medium-brown complexion gives away little about her ancestry. In fact, she is the daughter of a Xhosa father and a white French mother. But Cass has always been hard to classify, even in a country where racial classification was, for decades, a matter not just of personal prejudice but of public policy. "After 1948, when the Afrikaaners gained power, there were 12 categories just for "coloureds' [people of mixed race]," Cass recalls. "I didn't fit into any of them. So, much to their annoyance, they had to put in me in category thirteen: "other'."
Cape Malay people trace their lineage back to the Muslim soldiers and slaves, from India and Indonesia as well as Malaysia, who began arriving in South Africa in the 17th century. They have a deeply rooted culinary tradition, as Cass explains, "The Cape Malays still cook most of their dishes the same way their forefathers did 300 years ago." Their food is a deliciously spicy mixture of Indian and Indonesian cuisines with spices, fresh vegetables, fish, and lamb at its heart. Dishes such as sosaties (heavily marinated kebabs) and bobotie (a fruity, curried moussaka-style dish) have now entered the mainstream of South African cuisine.
Perhaps the classic everyday Malay dish is bredie - a succulent, slow-cooked vegetable or lamb stew, flavoured with cloves, allspice, pepper and chillies. But the beloved bobotie has become South Africa's national dish. It is a delicious sweet and spicy blend of minced beef, onions and spices, topped with a baked egg mixture rather like custard and served with rice. Important as the ingredients are, however, Cape Malay cuisine isn't just a style of cooking but a style of eating.
It is food explicitly intended to be shared, whether at a wedding, a funeral, or a simple family dinner. It is food designed, as Cass puts it, to be "social glue". Not being a Cape Malay herself, she came to this knowledge fairly late in life, and not entirely by choice. "At the age of 27,
I had never eaten a curry," she recalls. "I was a Roman Catholic and a radical student who thought all the world's problems could be solved by love and marijuana." Then she met her husband, a devout Muslim. Right from the start, she was expected to cook meals not only for him but for his mother and sisters as well. "In that community, not being a good cook is a major disgrace," she says. "So I had a simple choice: learn to cook or risk my marriage."
She began taking lessons from her husband's grandmother, who was the granddaughter of a Malay slave, but her early efforts weren't good. "The first thing I cooked was a bredie," she says. "It didn't go down too well." Nor, unfortunately, did anything else she whipped up immediately after that. Night after night, she would bring forth a meal. And night after night, her efforts were ridiculed. "Finally, one day, my husband said, "This is very nice, but...' once too often," she chuckles. "So I tipped a bowl of food right over his head." Supping at Cass's table today, it's clear that over time she has honed her skills and now her early fumblings are virtually unimaginable.
Like her house, Cass's kitchen is neither
spacious nor opulent. But no matter, she works magic in it anyway. "I cook entirely by feel," she says, as she carefully pours sunflower oil into a huge saucepan and then adds some chopped onions, cabbage, cardamom, peppercorns, cloves and allspice. She then deftly shreds five snoek - a small fish similar to mackerel - into a heap of straw-like filaments.
"Soldiers used to tuck dried snoek into their food boxes during the Second World War - but the trend didn't last long because it smelled so bad," she says, laughing. At the same time she slices up some chicken, rubs it with flour and lets it sizzle in hot oil to create another dish - Cape chicken curry. Into this second pan she then lobs chopped onion, cumin and as many as 15 other spices, including ginger and garlic, cassia and coriander and a bay leaf the size of a hand-held fan. Then comes the "secret" ingredient - a tin of tomatoes. "They are sweeter and riper in a can than they are when they are fresh," she explains.
Turning her attention back to the starter, Cass cuts some pap (a white grainy substance derived from maize) into circles about three inches across. Onto these discs she balances a layer of the cabbage mixture, then the snoek, which is topped with a sprinkling of cardamom seeds. And there, within half an hour and with little apparent effort, is a delicious lunch for five.
Even before Cass had fully mastered the art of Cape Malay cooking, she had an inkling that this was an art that could be turned into commerce. Not long after getting married she went to work for a rice company; conducting cooking demonstrations, often for organisations chock-a-block with wealthy white women.
"That was a nerve-wracking time," she recalls. "I was afraid these smart, conservative whites would kill this bush woman." Despite being university-educated, Cass had no formal culinary training.
"I knew I couldn't compete with people who
had been to culinary institutions - my white counterparts - so I researched each dish and built up stories about them, so that I could bring the traditions of Cape Malay food to life."
Far from being killed by these women, Cass was a huge success and, on top of revealing her ample gifts as a saleswoman, her adventures in suburbia taught her something crucial: that "conservative white women" were hungry for a taste of authenticity - and willing to pay for it.
"Suddenly everyone was saying, "This Cape Malay food, it's actually South African food, it's a fusion of all these cultures,'" she recalls. "What I found out was that white women didn't know how to cook this food. And I thought the best way to teach them was to provide both the recipes and all the spices, because there were no spices sold in the white areas at that time."
She was right. In no time, Cass's business was up and running, with her celebrity not far behind. "The business took off like a rocket," she says,
with a mixture of satisfaction and surprise in her voice. "And today, the biggest buyers are still the conservative white women."
As Cass prepares to bring her products to Britain, she fervently hopes that the success she has enjoyed in South Africa can be repeated. Considering what she has accomplished already, this challenge seems small in comparison. After
all, having overcome the prejudices of white South Africa, conquering the palates of London and Leeds ought to be a piece of... bobotie.