by Dave Dewitt
East African foods are as heavily spiced with chiles as are the West African dishes. Kenyans serve a stew called kima, which combines chopped beef with red chile powder and curry spices. It is obviously derived from the keema, or mincemeat curries of India. East African cooking has been greatly influenced by Indian curries, which are usually not prepared from powders but rather from combinations of chiles and curry spices that are custom mixed for each particular dish. Tanzanians are fond of combining goat or chicken with curried stews, or simply charcoal-broiling the meats after they have been marinated in a mixture of curry spices and chiles.
Curries are also important in the cookery of Mozambique, despite its history as a Portuguese colony. Its proximity to Natal in South Africa is probably the reason for that. Sometimes cashew nuts, a major crop in Mozambique, are added to their curries, much as candlenuts are added to Malaysian curries. Mozambique cooks are known for a chile paste that’s almost a curry paste. Piri-piri, made not with bird’s eye chiles but with the long, thin fiery African chiles that are probably cayennes, contains garlic, herbs, and oil too—but no curry spices. It is, however, analogous to curries in the native cuisines of East Africa that were not influenced by Arabs, Indians, or the British.
Ethiopia is one of those East African countries least influenced by British and Indian versions of curry—instead, they evolved their own unique curry tradition. Daniel J. Mesfin, author of Exotic Ethiopian Cooking, asserts: “Marco Polo did not visit our country. And Ethiopia was never conquered. It came under brief Italian rule during Mussolini’s time, but for the most part, we did not have direct and intimate dealings with foreign powers.” Ethiopia was isolated from Europe but not from the spice routes. “Since Ethiopia was located at the crossroads of the spice trade,” observes Michael Winn, owner of New York’s Blue Nile restaurant, “its people began to pay keen attention to blending spices. Fenugreek, cumin, red chiles, and varieties of herbs are used lovingly in creating meat, fish, and vegetable dishes.”
Ethiopian kitfo with berbere. Photograph by Yjohny. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Even the butter is curried in Ethiopia, with ginger, garlic, turmeric, basil, cardamom, and other spices combined to make a ghee-like concoction known as nit’ir qibe, or Ethiopian curried butter. But the most important spice mixture is a condiment called berbere, which is made with the hottest chiles available, plus other spices, and served as a side dish with meat, used as a coating for drying meats, or used as a major ingredient of curried meats.
Tribal custom dictated that berbere be served with kitfo, a warm, minced, raw meat dish. According to legend, the more delicious a woman’s berbere was, the better chance she had to win a husband. Recipes for berbere were closely guarded since the marriageability of women was at stake.
Laurens van der Post philosophized on berbere in 1970: “Berbere gave me my first inkling of the essential role played by spices in the more complex forms of Ethiopian cooking. . . . It seemed to me related to that of India and of Indonesia, particularly Java; I suspect that there may have been far more contact between Ethiopia and the Far East than the history books indicate.” Most berbere recipes contains about 11 curry spices in addition to garlic; notable for its absence is turmeric, a popular ingredient in Indian-influenced curries but not in Ethiopian ones. Some berbere recipes call for up to a cup or more of powdered hot chiles, so they are extremely important to berbere. And they have even inspired a derogatory expression, ye wend alich’a, meaning a man who has no pepper in him. The average daily consumption of chiles in Ethiopia is a little more than half an ounce per person, so they are as much a food as a spice. Berbere is an indispensable ingredient in the “national dishes” known as wat or w’et (depending on the transliteration), which are spicy, curry-like stews of lamb, beef, chicken, beans, or vegetables (but never pork).
AMBROSIA FROM THE CAPE
The curries of the Cape of Good Hope, often called “ambrosia,” came from two sources: the early Malayan slaves who served their Dutch masters as farm workers, and the Indian indentured servants who came first to work in the sugar fields of Natal around 1860 and later to work on South African railroads. The Dutch had colonized South Africa because of its ideal position halfway between the Netherlands and their possessions in the Spice Islands. It was a perfect outpost for raising the vegetables and livestock necessary to replenish their ships. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company dispatched a party of officials to the Cape to establish a “revictualing station.” Renata Coetzee, in The South African Culinary Tradition, observes: “Within fourteen days of their arrival these early settlers had laid out a vegetable garden.” Their plantings included New World crops like chile peppers, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and pineapples, plus Old World foods such as watermelons, cucumbers, radishes, and lemon and orange trees.
Late in the seventeenth century, with the revictualing station in operation, commerce between the Dutch East India Company and the new Dutch colony of South Africa picked up considerably because of an important commodity: Malay slaves, referred to in South African literature as “the king of slaves.” The men were utilized as farmers, carpenters, musicians, tailors, and fishermen, while the women were expert cooks who not only introduced exotic Spice Islands dishes but also imported the spices necessary to prepare them. Among the Malaysian spices transferred by the slaves to South Africa were anise seed, fennel, turmeric, ginger, cardamom, cumin, coriander, mustard seed, tamarind, and garlic.
The Cape Malays, as the slaves’ descendants were called, developed a unique cuisine called, by some, “Old Cape cookery.” It evolved into a mixture of Dutch, English, and Malay styles and ingredients—with an emphasis on the Malay. Predominant among the numerous cooking styles were curries and their accompaniments. As early as 1740, “kerrie-kerrie” dishes were mentioned in South African literature. That terminology had changed by 1797, when Johanna Duminy of the Riviersonderend Valley, wrote in her diary: “When the evening fell I had the candles lit, the children were given their supper and put to bed. At nine o’clock we are going to have a delicious curry.”
Johanna’s curry probably was milder than that of today in South Africa because for a time chiles and green ginger were greatly reduced for the Dutch palate. But the Cape Malays relished the heat, and Harva Hachten, author of Kitchen Safari, points out: “Curries are as much a part of Malay cooking as they are of Indian.” But they also became English too, for the British had seized the Cape in 1795 to prevent it from falling into French hands, then lost it for a few years to the Dutch, starting in 1803, before finally conquering it in 1806. British sovereignty of the area was recognized at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. As in India, the British settlers fell in love with curries.
Sylvester Stein, the former editor of Drum magazine, describes his childhood in 1920s Durban, South Africa: “In the Indian area you could get a really hot chilli curry and rice, as opposed to the insipid Raj-English curry elsewhere in white cafes.” In nearby Rhodesia there was a similar situation, as Zimbabwe-born artist Trevor Southey observes: “Curries were perhaps the most distinctive food we ate. Indeed, strange though it may seem, I tend to think of curry as the closest to a national Rhodesian dish there is.”
AT LAST, A PROFESSIONAL AFRICAN FOOD HISTORIAN
C. Louis Leipoldt was the inspiration for the name of Leipoldt’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, Pretoria. The restaurant describes him on their website as a “poet, playwright, pediatrician, botanist, journalist, novelist, cook and connoisseur of food and wine.” The son of a preacher with a mother so strict she forbade her children from “mingling with the town folk,” Leipoldt was confined to his house and began to hang around the kitchen, where he helped Maria, the Malay cook, prepare all the family meals. She was his first culinary inspiration, and he writes about her in Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery: “She presided over a kitchen whose cleanliness could have served as model for an operating theatre of a modern hospital.” Maria taught him the basic principles of Ma
lay slow-cooked food “accompanied by a good-natured but nevertheless painful prodding of [his] juvenile person with the large wooden spoon that was her sceptre.” She helped him “to realise how any infringement of the [principles] impairs the excellence of all cookery.” Maria also told him the secret of using curry spices and chiles: “Get the soul out of the spice and into the meat.”
Leipoldt left South Africa to pursue his medical career, and while studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital in Chelsea in London in 1907, when he had had enough of dissecting bodies, he went across to the Strand to wash dishes in the kitchen of one of the greatest of all chefs, Auguste Escoffier, at the Savoy. “Quite remarkably,” writes Paul Murray in his online article, “The C. Louis Leipoldt Trail,” “it was not long before he sat for his exams in cookery under the maestro and returned successful, with an international qualification in cuisine.” Now a chef as well as a doctor, he returned to South Africa to pursue his many careers simultaneously.
Brian Lello, who wrote the preface to the 1976 edition of Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery, describes the author as “an anti-pedant” who “eschews finicking precision about quantities. Let others write medical prescriptions for food instead of cultivating their flair.” For one recipe, Leipoldt writes: “Collect as many limpets of the rocks as your backache will allow.” Once, when an editor questioned the meaning of one of his passages, he cried out testily: “How should I know what I meant; that is your job.”
Leipoldt’s cookbook, Kos vir die Kenner (Food for the Connoisseur), first published in 1933, was republished in June 2011 by Human and Rousseau in Cape Town. It has 2,000 South African and international recipes. In Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery, written in the 1940s but not published until after his death in 1947, Leipoldt gives his philosophy about chiles in cookery: “Whatever it is that imparts this extraordinarily sharp, stimulating quality of chillies [capsaicin], also imbues then with distinctively individual merits that have long been appreciated by South African cooks. . . . It is also so stimulating, so valuable as a contrasting flavour, and so delicious when properly used, that other dishes, without it, are insipid and altogether lack distinction.”
C. Louis Leipoldt. Photographer unknown. Wikimedia. This work was first published in South Africa and is now in the public domain because its copyright protection has expired by virtue of the Copyright Act No. 98 of 1978, amended 2002.
Laurens van der Post, who says that “the person who has once acquired a taste in the tropics for Indian curries, Oriental spices or African chillies becomes an addict,” knew Leipoldt so well that they often discussed their philosophies about spicy South African specialties. And both of them agreed that curry manages to find its way into very unusual dishes. Take bobotie, for example, which Van der Post says “is to South Africa what moussaka is to Greece”—except for the fact that it contains both turmeric and curry powder. And those are only two of the variations of a dish about which Van der Post observes: “There are as many boboties as there are homes in South Africa.” Leipoldt points out that bobotie “was known in Europe in the middle ages when the Crusaders brought turmeric from the East.” This of course was bobotie without chile peppers, which arrived centuries later. Essentially, boboties are spiced-up meat pies. Leipoldt explains the process of making a dish that is quite similar to moussaka but one spiced up with fresh ginger, chiles, and curry powder. It is one of what Van der Post calls the “the three great Cape Malay main dishes.” The other two are bredie and sosatie.
Bredie is a spiced-up stew of meat, a starch such as potatoes, and various vegetables—a dish Leipoldt describes as “intimately stewed so that the flesh is thoroughly impregnated with vegetable flavour.” Van der Post adds that “the chosen vegetables, sliced or cubed, are placed on top of the meat with various seasonings, but always with chilies.” Sosaties, or “curried kebabs,” as Leipoldt calls them, are derived from two Malay words, saté (satay), a spiced sauce, and sésate, which means meat skewered on a stick. Sosaties have “endless variations,” according to Van der Post; and Leipoldt, in his typical lyrical manner, writes that “there is perhaps no other single dish that can be regarded as more genuine Africans than sosaties. . . . Sosaties, when properly made, should be tender and tasty, yet with a crispness that rivals a grilled chop, and bitingly spicy yet with a suavity that rivals the best made curry.” In South Africa, it’s all about getting back to curry.
Chicken sosatie. Photograph by chee.hong. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
A PERI-PERI GOOD TIME: SPICED UP SOUTH AFRICA
Chile peppers lured us to South Africa. One was a popular pickled pepper that was the focus of a plant patent matter that I was consulting on, the Peppadew®. The other was the peri-peri, the principal pepper used in the hot sauces of Nando’s, a large chain of spicy chicken restaurants based in South Africa.
The adventure began with an e-mail from Derek Harms, a barrister who was handling a legal action challenging a plant patent. Would I consult on the case as an expert? Yes, I replied. Would I travel to South Africa as the client’s guest expert and testify at the hearing in front of the Registrar of Plant Patents of the South Africa Department of Agriculture? You bet!
By a weird coincidence, I also had an e-mail from another South African deeply involved with peppers, Chris Thorpe, the general manager of the international grocery division of Nando’s. Chris offered me a tour of South Africa and the Nando’s operations there if I were ever in the country. I replied yes, of course, and told him about legal case I was consulting on, and a deal was struck. The first week I’d be in Pretoria for the hearing, but after that Chris would show us around his country.
Pretoria and Johannesburg
To get to South Africa, we first flew from Albuquerque to Minneapolis, where we caught a flight to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. That remarkable airport has both a casino and a museum! We were able to change our dollars for rand, the currency of South Africa. Then we boarded the nonstop flight to Johannesburg that went nearly the entire length of the African continent. At the airport, we were picked up by a polite but reticent driver who drove us to the Holiday Inn in Pretoria, the capital of the country. Our room overlooked a lovely garden of tropical plants surrounding the swimming pool.
For the first few days I was constantly in meetings with Derek as we planned out the testimony for the hearing. During the downtime, we did touristy things like visiting the National Zoo and the impressive Voortrekker Monument that was a tribute to the Dutch settlers. I also watched several rugby matches that I enjoyed enormously. We ate hotel food that was pretty good, including bobotie, a curry mince pie, fiery mutton chops, chicken that tasted like chicken in the old days, and spicy masala chickpeas. However, the South African beer was very disappointing. All the brands are owned by South African Breweries, which also owns Miller Beer in the US, and although there is a great wine tradition in South Africa, the beers are very ordinary.
The hearing in the plant patent case went very well, but I had to fight off an aggressive attorney for the other side who kept trying to put words in my mouth. But I had previous experience in court, kept my cool, and some of my sarcastic replies to questions made the registrar laugh. I can’t really go into the details of the case, but although we won the first round, that ruling was overturned on appeal. With the work over, it was time for some fun. Big-game fun.
A bowl of Peppadew ® peppers. Photograph by Duplass. Bigstock Photo.
Kruger National Park
Chris picked us up at the hotel in a van that held numerous other people, including his girlfriend, Valerie; Selwyn Bron, the personal assistant to the owner of Nando’s, Robbie Brozin; and Rochelle Schaetzl, director of new product development. John Paidoussi, the CEO of the grocery division of Nando’s, and his wife, Dawn, met with us later that evening.
A yellow-billed hornbill stealing breakfast at our bush camp. Photograph by Dave DeWitt.
We were headed to Robbie’s lodge at Leopard Creek, the exclusive golf estate just across
the Crocodile River from Kruger National Park. The three-hour drive on excellent highways took us through rolling grassland, patches of forests, lakes with trout in them, and mountain passes—but no jungles. Forget jungles, because South Africa doesn’t have them.
Apparently Robbie does a lot of entertaining at his lodge, because the five guest rooms were beautifully decorated and each had its own luxurious bath. There was cable TV for watching the rugby matches, or you could go out on the verandah and watch the hippos in the Crocodile River or the vervet monkeys in the trees. I’m no expert, but the golf course was amazingly beautiful, with ponds and perfectly manicured greens. There were birds like fish eagles and little antelopes called bushbucks everywhere. That night, Rochelle, who’s the de facto Nando’s Official Corporate Chef, prepared an amazing dinner with nearly every course spiced up with various Nando’s products, especially their peri-peri sauces.
The next day we took an eight-hour tour of Kruger National Park with hopes of seeing the Big Five: elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo, lion, and leopard. Paved roads loaded with elephant and other animals’ droppings took us through the park, and only at official tourist stops with buildings were we allowed to get out of the van. Our hosts were extremely knowledgeable about the wildlife. The scenery was pure savannah, with open spaces, brush, acacia trees, and the occasional watering hole. Finally, we were in what looked like the African plains of the movies.
