Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  Each boy would bring one staple, like pasta, flour, things you couldn’t buy easily in the mountains. Choclo (corn), potato, green beans, tomatoes, onions, eggs, garlic—these ingredients we bought in the Andean villages, but everything was very tiny because it was from the high mountains and not really from a farming economy. The people just grew things for themselves and not for large production. We would also trap rabbits. I learned how to dress a rabbit from the campesinos. After skinning it, I’d dry out the fur on a stick and bring it home to put on a chair.

  These days, I cook about four out of seven days a week. I make the things my mother taught me to cook, though I’ve adapted them. Paola no longer eats beef or pork, so we make do with chicken, turkey, and fish. I make big batches of seviche. My children, Madeleyn and Esteban, gobble it up. I also still make charquicán. If it’s rainy, I sometimes make sopaipillas pasadas as a treat (fried dough dipped in melted brown sugar).

  On Sundays, I often get the night off. Paola will make empanadas. I love them, but I have never learned how to make them. I can cook the insides, the meat, the fillings, but I don’t know how to bake.

  Recipe File

  Seviche

  Serves 6

  2 pounds tilapia or flounder

  3 lemons

  5 limes Salt to taste

  3 sweet potatoes

  2 stalks celery

  1 2-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled

  1 red onion

  ½ cup chopped cilantro

  2 jalapeño peppers

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  Slice the fish in ½-inch strips and put it in a pan.

  Squeeze the juice from the lemons and limes and pour over the fish.

  Add salt. The fish begins to “cook”—let it sit 30 to 40 minutes, in the refrigerator.

  Boil the sweet potatoes.

  Dice the celery, ginger, and red onion.

  Roast the jalapeños over a flame until the outer skin burns; let sit 10 minutes, then slide the burnt skin off. Thinly slice the jalapeño peppers.

  After the fish has been marinating in the citrus juice for the 30 to 40 minutes, add all the other ingredients, except the sweet potato, to the fish and mix.

  Let sit an additional 20 to 30 minutes in the refrigerator before serving.

  The longer you wait, the richer the flavors will get.

  Serve the seviche accompanied by half a sweet potato.

  TONY EPRILE

  A Taste for Politics

  Tony Eprile grew up in South Africa, where his father edited the country’s first mass-circulation multiracial newspaper. He is the author of the novel The Persistence of Memory, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Koret Jewish Book Award winner. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Details, George, and Gourmet magazines. He lives in Bennington, Vermont, with his wife and son and a dog named Thembi.

  “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” Walt Whitman once wrote, and the same is true of cooks. During my years of growing up, my mother was an excellent cook, pushing herself over time to ever-greater heights—my home, in Johannesburg, South Africa, was famous among my friends as the place where you’d get five desserts after an exotic and inventive dinner. But while I learned to cook from the women in my family, I learned the meaning of food from someone notorious for not being able to boil an egg without letting the pot burn dry: my father. Although my dad was the type who would likely perish from starvation before he could figure out how to use the electric can opener, he was a true food appreciator, enjoying it not only for its sensual pleasure but for the way it serves as communication, even discourse, between people. He held a lifelong goal to escape prejudice, and one way to do so was to share food. He had a knack for fitting in with the culture of whatever people he encountered, and if they were going to eat unidentifiable animal parts in a stew, well, he would bloody well give it a try, too.

  I grew up in South Africa in the years when apartheid squatted like a giant toad on the country, doing its best to keep the races as far apart as possible. The mad plan was to keep everybody apart —separate schools, separate places to live, separate dining, down to the very utensils you’d eat with. As the white editor of a black newspaper in South Africa, my dad took delight in transgressing the written and unwritten rules of the country’s officialdom, finding himself in the homes and dining rooms (though, wisely, not in the kitchens) of black African, Indian, and Coloured (mixed-race) friends, and making opportunities wherever possible to share with them my mother’s culinary accomplishments.

  It was not always so for him. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Scotland during and just after the First World War, and while I’d hesitate to call my distant ancestors closed minded, they were certainly no models for an adventurous outlook toward food or foreign cultures. My father once wrote in a personal note to a cousin about a childhood encounter with a neighbor, a Chinese woman whose children had scarlet fever:

  My cousin Zena and I were warned never to accept candies from the Chinese woman lest we, too, catch scarlet fever. For years I believed the eating of Chinese food was the most darkly un-Jewish thing one could do and that Moses would come down from the mount and chastise me if I ever polluted the family escutcheon with anything Chinese.

  In later years, aghast at his own early attitude, he liked to mockingly imitate the solemn head shake with which he and his cousin refused the proffered treats. He came to love Chinese food, and one of my early restaurant memories is of the Bamboo Inn in downtown Johannesburg, my father amusing the waiters with his idiosyncratic but effective method of holding chopsticks, gripped between thumb and index finger the way Ping-Pong players hold a paddle. Under apartheid’s byzantine racial classification system, South African–born Chinese people were classified as “Asian” or “Coloured,” making them second-class citizens with a few privileges over black South Africans, who weren’t even recognized as citizens. Since South Africa did business with Taiwan, however, a Chinese person from that island was considered an “honorary white.”

  Apartheid infiltrated every aspect of South African life, and while you might find Anglicized versions of Indian or Chinese food at many restaurants—and white children like me would often eat pap (a maize porridge, and a staple starch in southern Africa) or other African foods served by the cook and nanny—you had to make a great effort and risk breaking the law to eat the genuine article. It was illegal for a white person to go into the “locations” without a special permit, but my father was willing both to ignore this and to use his press credentials to talk his way out of trouble.

  My first encounter with South Africa’s homegrown fiery Indian food was at the house of one of my dad’s colleagues, G. R. Naidoo, who edited the Natal edition of Drum magazine. We were holidaying in a seaside town just south of Durban and drove into the Indian section tucked back in the hills surrounding the city to visit the Naidoos for the evening. After being served drinks and blazing-hot chili bites, we were served more drinks and more spicy snacks. Finally, around nine o’clock, my dad announced we were leaving. “But you haven’t had dinner yet,” the host said. It turned out that their particular traditional expectation was that my mother would go into the kitchen and help supervise the cooking, making sure the spices were acceptable and in the right quantities. I don’t recall what time we finally ate, but I do remember that I had never before experienced food that was this delicious and yet as assaultive to the mouth and palate as biting down on live scorpions. (A favorite chili in the Durban region is known as mother-in-law’s tongue, and I’m convinced that the African sun makes chilies more potent than those grown elsewhere.) Although G. R. visited us at our Johannesburg flat, my father would not have been able to take this distinguished journalist to a restaurant in town. Once, when the two of them met up at the Johannesburg airport, my father ordered cups of tea from the airport cafeteria. The man at the cafeteria counter, noticing that one of the people standing in front of him was an Indian, ask
ed, “Is one of these for him?” He quickly grabbed an old tin mug and transferred the tea into that.

  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)