Ch. 5: Samp and Bean Curry

Slowly I’m learning not to associate Hindi and Nepali with food. But since I’ve been here I’ve heard those languages every evening in the kitchen, and it is always accompanied by the smell of cumin and sizzling onions. I can sometimes guess what they are saying – the burner’s too hot, don’t add milk to that, the tomatoes need to be chopped, a little too salty – and the language has developed a flavor of its own. But as I interact more with my housemates, and I hear them speak to each other in other contexts, I am unlearning this narrow association. Daksha and Anne are the Nepalis. Aadesh, Daksha’s boyfriend, is from India, and doesn’t speak Nepali, though he understands it. All three speak Hindi, which makes it the language of commerce in the kitchen. Anne also speaks her ethnic language, Nevari, and French because she went to a French school as a child. Daksha’s regional language is Parsi. Aadesh speaks a couple of other Indian languages and understands several others. Of course, all of them speak English fluently as well, although Aadesh occasionally says “hotel” when he means “restaurant,” and remains confused about the letter V.

I speak none of these languages. Not even French. But every night I join them in the kitchen. Along with their languages, all three were taught from a young age the art of cooking, and I have the great fortune to be their apprentice. Tonight is my big night -- Daksha is not feeling well and needs to study, so she suggested that I cook dal, or lentils. Here is the test of my cooking acumen – no written recipe, just the wisdom of these three masters, who at times disagree on the details. Now in performance mode, I set out washing the rice and the lentils, and chopping the onion and garlic. But by the time I am ready to put oil in the pan, all of the burners on the stove are in use. Our other housemates, all Americans, have decided to cook tonight as well. Joy, who also went to a French school as a child, is making stuffed peppers and cous cous with Natalie. Marc, who is minoring in Chinese, is boiling pasta for chicken alfredo. The only one not present is Josh, who has taught himself some Afrikaans, and somehow had a short conversation in Swedish when he met our neighbor from Stockholm. He might’ve gone out to eat. But everyone else has a burner, and I have to wait. I pass the time by chopping the garlic into smaller pieces.

Multilingualism is the norm in Cape Town, and not only among international students. The mother language of most whites is English or Afrikaans. For most Coloureds it is Afrikaans, and for most Africans it is Xhosa. Afrikaans is the evolution of the swab of Dutch that was put into the petri dish of the Cape Colony when it was settled in the 17th century. Since Afrikaners made up the National Party which created and maintained apartheid, it was seen by many blacks as the language of the oppressor. When Afrikaans was set as the language of the schools, children took to the streets in protest. In Cape Town, Xhosa (pronounced with kind of a slurping click) is the most prominent Bantu language. It is similar to Swati, Zulu, and Ndebele, which, along with English, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga, are also among the eleven official languages of South Africa. Many Africans speak more than one of these languages. And most people in Cape Town also speak English, with accents that betray their mother language.

The English here is a bit different. It shares its spelling with the motherland, and Marc was docked points on an exam for spelling “finalise” with a “z” and “labour” without a “u.” Then of course there are the vocabulary differences. “Just now” is some point in the near future. Corn is “mealie.” “Howzit?” is a common greeting. Musical note-values have completely different names – a 64th note is a “hemidemisemiquaver,” which presumably some South African musicians can say without laughing.

It is easy to tune out Xhosa and Afrikaans in everyday life, but I wish I knew more of them. I would love to take Xhosa at UCT, but it didn’t fit into my schedule. Instead, I must pick it up here and there. My first lesson was a few weeks ago when I was walking home from Shoprite. Three women were trying to push a car into a gated lot, and it wasn’t moving much. I offered my help, and we made slow and steady progress until we reached an incline. Now at a standstill, one of the women went to Main Road, and came back with a guy about my age. He silently joined the struggle, and when we remained stuck, he looked into the driver’s door and released the emergency brake. Still wordless as the rest of us laughed at ourselves, he helped us push it into place and then walked off. The three women had been far from silent, but their chatter had been in Xhosa. When they thanked me for my help, I asked them to teach me a few words. This is how I learned molo – hello, and kunjani? – how are you? The other place I have picked up some Xhosa is in church, where the hymns are projected in Xhosa with their English translations.

Finally, Marc dumps his alfredo onto a plate, and I can put down a frying pan and add my finely chopped garlic. I follow the process that I have seen – adding onion, then turmeric, then cumin, sautéing until the onion is limp and translucent, turning off the rice when the water is absorbed, mashing the lentils until they are the right consistency, and finally adding the onions to the lentils, with some tomato and a little butter (one of Aadesh’s “secret ingredients”). We sit down to eat, and I watch their faces closely for the verdict. Thankfully, I am given a nod of approval. To me, it doesn’t taste as good as when they made it, but I’ll improve. I will learn the theory, which can then be applied to many dishes. So far one of my favorites has been one we invented: samp and bean curry with green beans. Samp is large kernels made of corn meal and is a traditional South African staple. Somehow, it gracefully received the Indian/Nepali treatment given it by my housemates. In Cape Town, where languages and cultures are churned together on a regular basis, this was probably not the first experiment of its kind.