‘This is salt’, said Faldelah, ‘We also call it love’.
‘You can give it, but you cannot take it away. Now add a teaspoon of love’, she said. And so I did.
Food was central to all we did that morning, and to Faldelah, food and love are synonymous. People were also central to the enriching morning that I spent feeling a part of Bo-Kaap and understanding her history. It was a relaxed but mesmerising morning in the home kitchen of a mother, who was teaching me how to cook traditional Malay food, organized and facilitated by an inspiring tour company called Andulela.
If you love food, or enjoy cooking, or are simply interested in enriching your knowledge of a unique part of Cape Town‘s history, then this tour is for you.
The Andulela Cape Malay Cooking Safari is all about immersing yourself into a love for cooking and food, and a love for community. It allows you to saturate yourself in the smells, colours and tastes of a wave of intoxicating herbs and spices, and a history as rich as the food.
I love to cook and I loved the tour. I (infuriatingly) don’t follow recipes, but I love mixing different flavours and colours together with extrovert abandon. Our kitchen is the centre of our home, and an invitation for a meal means sitting and watching and participating in the cooking as well.
Food, wine and good company are universal connectors, and this is what makes Andulela’s cape malay cooking safari such a success. They make food central to all that you do. (Andulela also run a number of other participatory tours and you should definitely visit their website at www.andulela.com . Check out their Cape Town Jazz Safari or their Cape Seafood Cooking Safari)
Andulela is a Xhosa word that loosely translated means ‘to be the first’. The tour runs for about four hours of which at least two and a half hours are spent cooking, talking and eating. I sincerely loved every minute of my time spent in Faldelah’s kitchen. My only anxiety was that I might miss making a mental note something that we were doing, but then I recieved a print out of all the recipes we prepared at the end of the tour.
We prepared our entire lunch from scratch. We made dough, cooked a delicious malay chicken curry, rolled roti’s, folded and filled samosas and made a sambal with a secret ingredient. Afterwards, we laid a table and sat down and ate it, with our right hands only, like the friends that we had all become in the two hours we had spent cooking together.
And it wasn’t just the food that made it special though. The food was important, central, but it was also all about talking and connecting, about having simple conversations together while cooking a meal in someone’s home.
I learned a lot, without learning. That’s how easy and pleasant the morning was. It wasn’t an effort, but I learned new things. Having grown up in Cape Town and considered myself well read, I thought that the historical part of the tour would be repetitive. It wasn’t. It isn’t. And it won’t be for you either.
I met Sabelo Maku of Andulela at the Bo-Kaap museum at the top of Whale Street and spent some time with him at the museum getting a broad understanding of the history of the Bo-Kaap area and the community that lives there. The museum is housed in the second oldest building in the area and dates back to 1790’s. I wish my children had been with me, to learn and understand an important part of their Cape Town heritage.
When we left the museum, Sabelo took me on a short walk through the heart of Bo-Kaap, pointing out places of interest and relating anecdotes as walked past the multicoloured houses, greeting the community members that we passed, and all the while Table Mountain was a backdrop behind the bright homes.
We spent at least half an hour at Atlas Trading, entering behind their bright pink walls and into a world where men in dust coats were surrounded by open boxes and bags of exotic spices. A magical world with big wooden bins full of spices and rices and exotically packaged ingredients. It was like a Harry Potter shop, where you could still scoop up exotic spices from big wooden bins and buy them by the kilogram. My delight was sealed when I enquiringly picked up some chunks of something and something that looked hard, but edible, to discover that I was holding myrrh and frankincense, and I could buy them both and take them home in a paper bag.
The spices available seemed to sell per kilogram for what you would usually get in a small 100 g bag at one of the larger retailers. It wasn’t just exciting, colourful and alluring, it was really good value too.
Then, we arrived at Faldelah’s kitchen and everything came together.
We cooked everything with love.
I rolled out large rotis under her watchful eye until they were paper thin and we could see the grain of the wooden table through the dough. I was admonished to do everything with tender loving care. ‘Not so hard, roll with love Charles!’ Faldelah said.
When dough needed kneading we showed it ‘tough love’. When pastry broke I was told not to worry that ‘breakups happen, and if you break-up, you must make-up. So join them together again.’
And as I was sitting at her table eating the first delicious mouthfuls of the meal that I had just helped cook, a thought went through my head: I envisaged 30 of my closest friends doing what I was doing, and I couldn’t think of a single one who wouldn’t enjoy it. Not even the beer swillers.
If you live in Cape Town this is the perfect tour for you to do in winter. You are guaranteed to learn something new and I promise you that you will have fun along the way. You feel welcome and participative. You don’t feel like an intruder.
Or, as one resident told me, ‘Sometimes tour buses drive through Bo-Kaap to look at all the colourful houses and take photos. The people smile and wave as they drive though and we smile back. Just like monkeys.’
With Andulela you don’t do that. You get a solid history of the area and then you walk though it on foot. They introduce you to local businesses that are worth supporting because of their quality and their price. And this is why the concept of Fair Trade in Tourism is embraced by the community – because it respects and includes them.
And then you spend two hours in somebodies home, cooking, talking and sharing a meal with them. They don’t feel like monkeys then, and you don’t feel like a tourist. You all feel like people meeting and sharing a meal and enjoying each other’s company.
And your time together is like salt.
I can’t express strongly enough how much of a difference it makes having honest and sincere interaction with the community that you are visiting. I had thought that this ‘Fair Trade’ form of tourism added an additional layer, an extra veneer. But this was not a veneer, it was a deeper and richer experience, more like a double thick layer of chocolate icing on a cake – with silver balls.
I felt so proud to have such a strong Muslim community in Cape Town. We really are a multi-cultural city, and we do work as a society.
I only wish that more of us got the chance to visit the Fair Trade in Tourism ventures in our midst.
We would see quite clearly that we are all flavoured with the same salt.
Contact
Andulela
Tel 021-7902592
Web www.andulela.com/english
For more information on these or other Fair Trade Tourism adventures, visit the FTTSA website, or join FTTSA on Facebook.
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