Bo-Kaap Kitchen
Maggie Mouton
Pictures by Craig Fraser
(Quivertree Publications)
It’s been many years since I have seen a new title embracing Cape Malay food and culture.
What makes this substantial hardback different from its predecessors is that it’s written and photographed by locals who are neither members of the Cape Muslim community nor known as cookbook writers.
Perhaps because of this, photographer Craig Fraser and writer Maggie Mouton turned first to tourism guide and Bo-Kaap specialist Shireen Narkedien and then to 21 women and a couple of men to embrace their heritage, record their stories and copy their recipes.
Some of these women are in their 80s, others are just starting their careers, like Rafeeqah Wallace who is studying to be a chef and working part-time at a city restaurant. All of them seem to have cooked from an early age and still do, so traditional fare features large in their stories.
Whatever their background or bank balance, the shared emphasis on family values, festivals and ceremonies is evident. Fraser and Mouton went to weddings, funerals, religious celebrations and to mosques, leaving them in no doubt as to the community’s contribution to Cape Town and South Africa.
Zainap Masoet’s cheerful acceptance of life’s circumstances is impressive: having left school early, she helped a formidable ouma cook, clean and raise her siblings in their District Six home.
Thanks to her father’s skills, they escaped being moved to Hanover Park and settled in Schotsche Kloof where he became a school caretaker. This is where she worked and brought up both her and her sister’s children: today she still cooks meals that can stretch – langsouskos, she calls it.
Masturah Adams’s story presents a contrast: she is a business strategist at a transport company who is giving back to the community with a soup kitchen she started during Ramadaan 11 years ago. With the help of community organisation Boorhaanol, they serve 250 families with 12 000 soup servings during the fast month.
In the middle of the fasting period orphans are taken on excursions by bus, and their day ends with a four-course meal or mass boeka – breaking of the fast. When Ramadaan ends, it’s time for Eid festivities, and the pace quickens as 8 000 servings of food for needy people are cooked, for Muslims and others alike. She is one of the few in the book who manages rather than cooks – but she says she makes sure of the quality, as she eats the food herself.
Several of the stars in the book cook and bake for tourists, most of whom rave about this fragrant, spicy cuisine. Just paging through the recipes that follow each life story brings to mouth-watering recall the enticing aromas of ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, cloves and turmeric.
Cape Malay cuisine had its origins in Indonesia, Malaysia and India, with contributions from Madagascar, north and east Africa. Here in the Cape, dishes introduced by Dutch, German and French settlers were spiced and adapted, while traditional ingredients, when unobtainable, were replaced with local produce, like dried naartjie peel. And thus a unique cuisine developed.
Few who discover the joys of bobotie and bredie, breyani, curry, cabbage-wrapped frikkadels and denningvleis would argue with those who say this is one of the most exciting peasant cuisines in the world.
Just as Cape Malay fare has borrowed from numerous cuisines, nearly every family tells the tale of a foreigner, seldom Muslim, who married into the family and the community. German, Scottish, Chinese, Turkish and Irish men were accepted and incorporated. The former District Six community was another example of religious tolerance as neighbours, whether Jewish, Indian or African, were friends – something one would be hard put to find today.
The stories and recipes would be lost without Fraser’s evocative photographs – most of the contributors chose to wear formal clothes and headscarves, standing or sitting in the doorways of their Bo-Kaap homes. The portraits are interspersed with a gallery of black and white family snapshots, groups at weddings, birthdays, engagement parties and treasured pictures of young women celebrating their coming of age or in bridesmaid finery.
Shots of the flat-roofed Cape Georgian houses, each dressed in pastel shades, provide background settings while the photographs of the luscious fare induce yearning for a Cape Malay feast. - Cape Argus