Cape Malay Food Sounds Incredible

And, the few women who worked in flour mills

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South Africa’s Cape Malay Cuisine

By Lauren Manuel McShane

Under the calls to prayer echoing from Cape Town’s mosques you’ll find the brightly-colored houses and tombs of exiled holy men of the Bo-Kaap district. The rich Cape Malay culture here weaves its way through the tapestry of South Africa’s tumultuous past and hopeful present. 

The people stolen from their homes in Indonesia, Malaysia, and East Africa, and shipped to Cape Town as slaves by the Dutch East Indian Company in the 17th and 18th centuries, were those who created Cape Malay culture. It exists to this day, forged by strong family and community bonds often centered around food, faith, and song.  

Photo: Andreas Wulff/Flickr

A short stroll through the Bo-Kaap will send you through scented clouds of cumin, coriander, and turmeric, along with masala (whole spices of cinnamon, mace, peppercorns, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, and cardamon pods toasted in a pan to release their aromatic flavors, then ground to a powder). Fruity, mild spices passed down through generations along with a wide breadth of flavors make Cape Malay dishes entirely different from other local specialities.

From tomato bredie (stew), breyani, and spicy curries around the family table to sosaties (kebabs) grilling and samosas frying at street-side stalls, many of the main meals are served with vegetables along with rice or roti. Sambal is a relish often served as a spicy side made from grated fruit and vegetables with chili, salt, sugar, and vinegar.

Sweet and sour flavors are popular too, courtesy of dried fruit such as apricots and raisins. Particularly popular is bobotie, a fragrant and mildly spiced curry topped with a rich custard and served with yellow rice.

Desserts that date back to the culture’s roots include koesisters and boeber, the latter being a traditional sweet milk tea made from sago, vermicelli, sugar with cardamom, cinnamon and rose water, and the former being a deep-fried donut dusted with coconut shavings. 🇿🇦

Recommended:

Quarter Kitchen is one of the Waterfront’s oldest restaurants. It occupies part of the original (1860) Breakwater Prison that housed the convicts who built the breakwater. 

Bo-Kaap Kombuis on Upper Wale Street.

Join acclaimed local chef Zainie Misbach for a cooking class in her home.

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Photo: IWM

The Very Few Women of 20th Century Flour Milling

By Amy Halloran

Milling grains into flour used to be, for most of history, household work, but as this and other domestic tasks moved out of the home and into the public marketplace in Europe and the United States, flour mills, bakeries, and breweries (once enterprises spearheaded by women) became realms for men and men alone. Commercialization excluded women from these fields, reflecting the same gender lines drawn through everyday life.

As the flour milling industry expanded in the early 20th century, however, one mill found room for women: their very own room, instructively labeled “No Man’s Land.” Washburn-Crosby Mill in Minneapolis hired 8 to 10 women as flour packers in 1902 or 1903. Included in the city-wide mill strike in September 1903 was the concern that the “girl packers” at Washburn-Crosby should not cause the male flour packers’ wages to decrease. Hiring women was seen as a threat to the value of a man’s work.

The next known instance of women working in commercial flour mills in the U.S. was during World War I. The Miller’s Almanack and Yearbook from 1916 reported that, “Owing to the shortage of workmen due to recruiting, women are employed in many British flour mills and perform the work acceptably.” American mills felt the pinch later; the Midland Mill in Kansas City, Missouri was, the “Northwestern Miller” reported, probably the first mill in the west to experiment with hiring women. (Apparently, the Washburn-Crosby Mill hadn’t been bragging about their female flour packers.) The July 1918 article said that four women had been hired to sweep in the mill and oil the machines. “The women are naturally neater, and are careful in cleaning the corners and over the tops of machines,” the article noted. 

Photo: IWM

Yet this didn’t make mill owners want to broaden their work pool beyond the war shortage. In a 1919 edition of “American Miller,” a transcript from a conference shows a few remarks on women, sandwiched between comments on machinery. “They do very well in case of emergency, but they cannot climb around, though the floor is swept very clean. It is impractical to employ girls except as sweepers or oilers,” said one Mr. Williams. Another mill owner said that women were also helpful in the weighing and bagging rooms, but the trouble was, men wanted to help them, so you really had to keep them apart.

Women re-entered milling during labor shortages in World War II, but the contemporary profession remains male-dominated, like many equipment-heavy workplaces. The exception is the emerging field of regional grains, where there are a significant number of women mill owners and operators. 🌾 

[Bibliography]

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More Food Reading:

• I was only born in San Francisco (in 1982) so I don't actually remember this era, but I do have great nostalgia for it.

• A great article - different from the others - about the Belcampo brouhaha. (The owners always claimed it was a vertically-integrated butchery. That’s looking quite dubious now.)

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