The Imperial African Cookery Book Recipes from English-Speaking Africa by Will Sellick
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The Imperial African Cookery Book Recipes from English-speaking Africa by Will Sellick Featuring memories from Inkosi Dr Mangosuthu Buthelezi MP Adelaine Hain The Rt Hon Peter Hain MP Chenjerai Hove Lord Joffe CBE Dr Roger Leakey Prue Leith CBE Dame Monica Mason DBE HE Dr Festus Mogae Matthew Parris Rupert Pennant-Rea The Most Rev and Rt Hon John Sentamu Sylvester Stein “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin Contents Introduction British people in Africa Indigenous cookery African food overseas Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania West Africa Mozambique and Angola South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho Ingredients Fruits and vegetables Herbs and spices Herbs and spices Meat, fish, game and poultry Dry goods Equipment Provisions Culture and etiquette Soups, snacks, starters and savouries Chilled lime and avocado soup Sorrel soup Peanut soup Ground nut soup Butternut and apple soup Caldo verde (green kale soup) Mulligatawny soup Orange and tomato soup Green mielie soup Sugar bean soup Kebobs Pasteis de bacalhau Indian toast Boiled ostrich egg Hot smoked salmon on toast Kedgeree Ostrich egg cheese omelette Scotch woodcock Scotch toast Chopped or gehackte herring Beef biltong Tassal Pickled fish Bulawayo savoury Main courses Aubergine casserole with cheese Fish frikkadels Zambezi fish bobotie Lobster Thermidor Hake and slap chips Bean curry Banana curry Mauritian fish stew Gesmoorde vis (Smothered fish) Fish breyani Mozambique prawns Zanzibar fish stew L.M. prawns Shrimp omelette Malay chicken curry Chicken in cashew sauce Pullau chicken Chicken casserole with cumin Peri-peri chicken Ashanti chicken Chicken pie Guinea fowl casserole Grilled guinea fowl with orange Braised pigeons with cherries Guinea fowl with cream Giraffe sausage Venison casserole Braised neck of venison with peaches Frikkadels Frikkadel curry Stewed oxtail Sosaties Bobotie Boerewors Beef and lemon casserole Stuffed pawpaw Denningvleis Pienang curry Skilpadjie Dutch roast beef Monkey gland steaks Mincemeat curry Goan pork vindalho Bunny chow Smoorvleis Durban meat curry Swart suur Snyboontjies (green bean) bredie Cabbage bredie Tomato bredie Waterblommetjie bredie Lamb xacuti Steak cooked in milk Lamb breyani Stewed trotters Pork stew with cockles A selection of salads, sauces and other accompaniments Potato salad Red cabbage with bacon Victoria Falls bacon and mielie fritters Lentil cakes Peanut stuffing Glazed sweet potatoes Irio Coriander and mint chutney Leipoldt’s curry paste Peri-peri sauce Fried pawpaw Yellow rice I Yellow rice II Coconut rice Sweet potato fritters Sorrel and spinach salad Cucumber salad Quince sambal Apple sambal Cucumber sambal Traditional blatjang Puddings ‘Miss Tilsley’ Chocolate Sunday pudding Watermelon and lime sherbet Baked pineapple pudding Mock apple pie Sutlach Mango and granadilla Charlotte Granadilla Pavlova Banana and wineberry fool Torta de laranja (orange torte) Bread pudding Melktert Baked plum-duff Baked lemon pudding Depression pudding Baked tropical fruit pudding Rice pudding Christmas pudding ice cream Malva pudding Cape bread and butter pudding Lemon meringue pie Butterscotch pears Baked custard pudding Cape brandy pudding Banana tart Apricot and vanilla soufflé Baked banana pudding Granadilla (passion fruit)ice cream Bread, cakes and biscuits Sour dough yeast bread Sourdough yeast starter Ashkoek Roosterkoek (or rooster-koekies) Mosbrood Mosbolletjies Carrot and mielie meal bread Rusks Malay roti Indian roti Vetkoek Honey loaf Cassava fairy cakes Koeksisters Fruit cake Glacé fruit triem Rhodes and Founders loaf Spiced honey loaf Apple cake Soetkoekies (sweet biscuits) Krapkoekies Honey biscuits Chocolate cakes Herzoggies or Herzog cookies Teiglach Butter biscuits Banana loaf Saboera biscuits Preserves, confectionery and drinks Tablet Pineapple fudge Banana jam Pawpaw jam Naartjie preserve Quince preserve Green fig preserve Citron preserve Orange preserve Marula jelly Brandy and ginger Van der Hum Advokaat Dom Pedro Amarula Pedro MalaMala Lemonade Pink gin Dawa Coconut lassi Ginger tea Rooibos tea Iced spiced rooibos tea Vanilla rooibos tea Braaivleis and barbecues Names Food suppliers Restaurants and cafes Illustrations Bibliography Acknowledgements Introduction frican cookery? Great! I love African food,” said the charming American woman. “A“Moroccan food is just the best, and there’s an amazing Ethiopian restaurant in Portland…” I explained that this book would focus on the colonial cookery of British Africa, and the woman looked puzzled before asking, “If you’re writing about Africa, why do you want a book about white folks’ food?” It is a valid question. The answer lies in the colonial history of Africa and its population, which includes communities of immigrant European, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern origin. For motivation to record this history, one has only to examine—or, better still, taste—the distinctive foods which each community brought with it. Sometimes dishes associated with a specific group of settlers have been adopted by the wider population: the golden yellow custard tarts (pasteis de natas) of the Portuguese, still enjoyed with morning coffee in Luanda and Maputo; iced Lebkuchen and slabs of Weihnachtsstollen, rich with candied peel and marzipan, piled on the shelves of bakeries in Namibia at Christmas; while at the Curry Tavern in the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg I used to queue for a platter of fiery, aniseed-scented mutton curry alongside Zulu police officers and blonde secretaries chatting in Afrikaans. Equally, as communities become assimilated into other groups, or emigrate from the region, their unique foodstuffs and recipes may disappear. French Huguenot settlers’ recipes such as oblietjies (waffles) remained popular in South Africa long after their descendants had embraced an Afrikaans-speaking cultural identity, but were all but unknown by the Second World War. Further north, Jewish emigration to Zambia and Zimbabwe brought the Mediterranean traditions of Sephardic cookery to European settler communities along the Copperbelt and in the cities of Lusaka, Salisbury (now Harare) and Bulawayo; and gave rise to a generation of African domestic servants trained in the Jewish dietary laws of kashrut. I began to write this book out of a desire to record a sample of traditional recipes inextricably linked with colonial life in British Africa. Some recipes in this book are for dishes still widely known and popular: others are less familiar. What they all share is a foundation in or adaptation to British colonial Africa, or a strong historical link with the settler past. These recipes’ common association with British Africa does not mean that they are British—far from it. After 350 years of settlement, British African cookery emerged from a mix of Tudor spices, Indian feasting, Malaysian gastronomy, Victorian gentlemen’s club dinners, and Boer survival foods. This unique and, in the final analysis, ephemeral cuisine reached its zenith during the brief period of African colonial rule—the “imperial intermission”, as it has been called—from about 1880 to 1965. Since then, it has largely been abandoned. In South Africa, the African country with the largest white population, colonial cookery styles cling on among the elderly and in conservative communities, particularly in rural farming districts. In the rest of Africa, British-style cookery is usually regarded at best as an amusing anachronism and at worst as a tangible hangover of colonial rule. However, African colonial cooking thrives in the white African diaspora outside Africa. The race for national independence in the years after the Second World War, and the consequent political upheavals, resulted in a worldwide dispersal of the white populations of many African countries. From Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Kenya we went to Australia, Europe and the USA; and, wherever we went, we took our foodstuffs and our family recipes. I have eaten spiced oxtail in Washington, DC; buttermilk rusks in Brussels and mutton curry in Brooklyn; drunk rooibos tea in the Ottawa Valley and Tusker beer in Paris. As the child of South African political refugees living in London in the 1970s, I remember my parents’ glee when my grandmother smuggled a couple of sticks of illicit beef biltong through Customs as a belated birthday present for my father; and my mother’s despair when import sanctions meant that she could no longer buy IXL Export Grade Whole Apricot Jam. Today African settler cookery is used in the post-colonial context as a signifier of cultural identity, a tangible demonstration of membership of a particular community within the wider African diaspora. This is reflected by developments in Africa itself, where the post-colonial political desire for a single, national cultural identity is expressed in the recent efforts of some African states to define and label a national cuisine. Notably, in most instances this new national cuisine incorporates significant influences from the period of colonial rule—whether by British, Belgian, Portuguese or French administrations. For example, although the textbook approved in 1985 for teaching cookery in Zimbabwean schools includes a large number of traditional recipes from black Zimbabwean cultures, the majority of the recipes are in fact for European dishes. Instructions for preparing flans and sponge cakes sit, perhaps incongruously, alongside recipes for goat’s tripe and ishwa (white ants). At its peak