Man With a Pan (35 page)

Like the majority of white South Africans (in fact, of any South Africans with a decent income), we had domestic servants. Most were employed by the apartment complex we lived in: the “flat boys,” who would sweep and scrub the wooden floors; the day and night watchmen; the “boss boy,” who kept an eye on all the other servants and once hit the newspaper deliverer with a club for taking the elevator instead of the stairs (my mother noticed the newspaper was covered in blood and gave him first aid). My family also employed a cook-nanny, Pauline Legodi, who was something of a second mother to my brother and me. She loved to cook and soon learned my mother’s recipes, her skinny frame filling out in the process. (Interestingly, the editors of a recent cookbook project to gather South African Jewish recipes interviewed the retired servants of Jewish families, since they were in some cases the only ones who still knew the grandmother’s recipes from the Old Country.) I used to sit at the wooden kitchen table and watch Pauline at the stove, where she would occasionally fry up a treat for me: fried onion sandwiches,
koeksisters
(fried dough dipped in a chilled syrup into which various spices—nutmeg, cloves—were blended). In a letter to my mom after we moved to the United States (when I was sixteen), she wrote that she was glad I was learning to cook, “only Tony must not add too much salt and swear.” I still swear when I’m in the kitchen, but I’ve taken her suggestion on the salt.

Given the peculiar dynamics of South Africa’s racial politics—and the fact that we regularly broke the law by serving wine and other liquor to black guests—Pauline was uncomfortable serving food on the nights my father’s black colleagues came to dinner, no matter who they were. Pauline was officially classified as “Coloured,” despite her Sotho (Bantu African) last name, and may have found it demeaning to serve blacks. “Is that fat African coming to dinner tonight?” she asked my mother on an evening when Chief Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, leader of the African National Congress, and mentor to Nelson Mandela, was coming over.

After this, my mother let Pauline leave early when African friends visited, serving the food herself. When Mandela was in hiding from the police (and known as the Black Pimpernel for his ability to elude discovery), he showed up at our apartment one evening dressed as a chauffeur, later staying the night at a liberal friend’s place down the corridor from us. A much-loved food was almost the cause of his capture when he was staying in a friend’s apartment in Berea, an all-white area (and one the police would be unlikely to look for him in). He enjoyed a traditional form of soured milk known as
amasi
and had put a bottle of milk out on the windowsill to sour in the sun’s rays. He realized his mistake when he overheard the African cleaners who worked in the building loudly discussing how this was puzzling behavior for whites and so there must be an African staying there.

Thinking back on my early years, I can see how race and ethnic separation filtered into our rituals of dining in more ways than we may have been aware. As Jews, we ate chopped liver and chopped herring, smoked
snoek
(a bony ocean fish that most closely resembles whitefish), “mock crayfish” (rock cod dressed up in a ketchup-mayonnaise mix to resemble lobster),
kichel
(fried dough bathed in honey, what my English great-aunt referred to as “South African doughnuts”), and salty matzo-ball soup at Passover. But still our dinners often followed the formality of the English style: soup (usually consommé) to start, salad, the main course, pudding. At friends’ houses, there would be the inevitable Sunday roast. And Afrikaans food was something we mostly would eat during our holidays in the Northern Transvaal or on school trips, and I came (wrongly) to associate it with fatty sausages and slightly rank cottage pies.

It would be inaccurate to say, however, that there was no mixing of cuisines during the apartheid years. Indonesian/Malay–based dishes were ubiquitous at poolside
braais
(barbecues), where they were misidentified as Afrikaans specialties. So even the most English of English South Africans would be found proudly laboring over roasting coals, above which sat
boerewors
(a Dutch-style sausage with fennel and other spices) and
sosaties
(lamb chunks marinated in a mixture of apricot, vinegar, and Indonesian spices). And of course, most mealtime tables included a bottle of Mrs. Ball’s
blatjang,
a Malay-style chutney.

It would be truer to say that apartheid affected
where
you could eat to a much greater degree than
what.
On our holiday trips, we would often provide transportation for one of my dad’s African friends going to visit family in the hinterlands. This meant that my mother would quietly make sandwiches or a roast chicken to be eaten at some roadside pull-over, as there would be no restaurants or cafeterias that would allow us all to sit down and eat together.

Now that the yoke of apartheid has been lifted for more than sixteen years, the flowering of a “rainbow culture” is nowhere more evident than in the quality and range of food that is available. There is a pride in the multiracial, multicultural inheritance of the country, and even in the food malls of the casino-hotel complexes that form the new way stations for tourists en route to the country’s attractions, you will find spice-fragrant curries; lip-scorching Mozambican
piri-piri
chicken; Malaysian-influenced
boboties;
and Mandela’s favorite stew, whose name is unpronounceable to most visitors,
umngqusho
(phonetically: Oom-nn—tongue click like a cork being pulled out of a bottle—koosho), along with an English–South African oddity, monkey-gland steak (referring to the sauce and containing no simian parts) and the Dutch-influenced grilled sausage,
boerewors,
which was long the honored dish of Afrikaners.

Although we left South Africa when I was a young teenager, following police raids on our home and my dad’s office, my mother and I kept up the tradition of cooking foods from the country’s many ethnic traditions. So it is a double kind of pleasure to reencounter old favorites and be introduced to new ones when I return to my birth country. Not long ago, I was back in what used to be the Northern Transvaal—now renamed Mpumalanga—the locale of some of my worst childhood meals, and so it was a joyous surprise that there I got to eat one of the best meals of my life. It was at a small restaurant called Digby’s, near the Kruger National Park, which featured fresh giant prawns from Mozambique brought in that day by refrigerated truck, along with a favorite of local Afrikaners,
soutribbetjies,
which are lamb ribs marinated in salt and saltpeter (as they would have been preserved by the early
trekboers
during their search for farmland as far from the English authorities as possible), then soaked and very slowly roasted until meltingly tender. Like many of the country’s restaurateurs, the young owner had lived abroad and gotten to know European and British cuisine before returning to rediscover his own homeland’s traditions and possibilities untethered from the old prejudices and restrictions. Digby’s has since been replaced by a new restaurant, Kuka, which prides itself on cuisine that it refers to as “Afro-chic,” a term that not only didn’t exist in the bad old days of apartheid but would likely have attracted police attention to its owners.

The one traditional offering that I don’t recall seeing on Digby’s menu was
bobotie.
This food was long claimed by Afrikaners as
their
national dish, though it is clearly of Indonesian/Malay origin. Almost every South African cook has his or her own recipe, and you’re likely to encounter lively debates around small details of spicing and preparation: Is it better to use
mince
—the South African word for ground beef—or ground lamb or, these days, ostrich, or to boil and then shred chuck or brisket? Allspice or no allspice? Fresh leaves from a citrus tree or dried bay leaves? I have my own recipe, which uses cashews as its main protein, making it a great dish for vegetarians (I once served it to the writer J. M. Coetzee). In
Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery,
the renowned poet and “bush doctor” C. L. Leipoldt quotes an anonymous seventeenth-century cookbook: “To make a
Bobootie,
it is necessary to have clean hands.” No one seems to argue with that. And today, what is also inarguable is that it is a dish you can enjoy anywhere, in any country, and in anyone’s company.

“By the time we got there, all we wanted to do was raid their kitchen.”

Recipe File

Vegetarian Bobotie

This recipe is my mother’s. We go back to old Cape Malay traditions by using tamarind as a souring agent, where many contemporary recipes call for Marmite, the yeast extract that excites such strong feelings that the British manufacturer’s slogan is “Love it or hate it.” Tamarind has its own fascinating history, the tree being a native of Africa that was transported to the East Indies, where its culinary qualities were developed, then returned to Africa with Indian and Indonesian slaves as a food flavoring.

1 large onion
1 tablespoon olive or canola oil
1 to 2 slices stale white bread
Milk
2 cups cashew nuts (preferably not roasted) ½ inch peeled fresh ginger
¾ cup dried apricots, soaked until they plump up
2 medium carrots, grated (drain off excess liquid)
¼ cup golden currants or seedless raisins
1½ tablespoons tamarind extract, dissolved in ¾ cup hot water
1 to 2 tablespoons dried unsweetened coconut (optional)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon turmeric
⅛ teaspoon cayenne or hot African pepper
1 tablespoon garam masala (or good-quality curry powder, in which case leave out the cayenne)
¼ teaspoon allspice (optional)

FOR THE CUSTARD

1 egg
1 cup milk
2 to 3 bay or lime leaves
Toasted slivered almonds (optional)
A pinch of nutmeg (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cut the onion into small slices, then fry slowly in oil in the dutch oven you’ll use for baking the final product, or in a separate sauté pan, until almost caramelized. Soak the bread in milk until soft, then squeeze out excess liquid. Chop the cashew nuts in a food processor, being sure not to pulverize them but leaving very small pieces. Chop the ginger finely and dice the apricots. Combine all ingredients except for those in the custard and mix well in a bowl, adding a very small amount of additional hot water if too dry, then place in a dutch oven that has been lightly greased. Bake covered for 30 minutes, then uncover. Beat the egg into the cup of milk to make the custard, pour the mixture over the top of the
bobotie
(see note), add bay leaves, and allow to bake uncovered for another 20 minutes or until the custard has set. Cooking time (which is based on a 3 ½-quart Le Creuset) may vary depending on the type and size of the dutch oven you use, so it’s best to test for doneness. (Note: A knife or skewer pushed into the
bobotie
should come out dry or with just a small amount clinging to it.) Also feel free to use more custard mix if you’re using a wider pot or the custard fails to over the nut mixture. Add toasted almonds and grated nutmeg (optional) to taste just before serving.

It’s a Cape Malay tradition to serve all food with numerous side dishes, known colloquially as
sambals.
These include various chutneys (especially the smooth peach and apricot chutney under the brand name Mrs. Ball’s
blatjang
) and mixed pickles, a warm cabbage salad spiced with sautéed mustard seeds, dal, sliced bananas and tomatoes, and a cucumber
raita.

On the Shelf

I’m an avid reader of cookbooks and like to make recipes from pretty much every country. On my bookshelf, you’ll likely find works by Madhur Jaffrey and Monica Bhide for Indian food, Naomi McDermott for Thai, Susanna Foo for Chinese, Marcella Hazan and Mario Batali for Italian, Paula Wolfert for Mediterranean, and Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless for Mexican—in other words, the standby major food writers. I’m more specialized when it comes to African food, and here are some favorites: