Borrowed Food

The photo doesn’t look like mutton curry does it? I’ll stick to it because I used a spice mix. My next bet will be mutton stew because of all the vegetables I threw in. Maybe it’s soup. No. All I know is that soup has a lot of water and it’s not filling. That’s why they serve it with a helper, a piece of bread, in England.

Back to my mutton curry. I call it borrowed food because curry is more than spices. It’s an art form. There’s a reason why this spice in added and that one is omitted, something I read in a recipe book by a writer born in India but based in the U.S. How can I forget the title? It’s very short.

Curry is borrowed food because our grandparents either roasted meat on an open fire, or boiled it until it released its own juice. They boiled or roasted vegetables like corn and pumpkin. How about sweet potatoes? We helped khulu (grandma) pull them from the ground, break off the roots, dusted off soil and had a bite. She just looked at us and smiled.

Our ancestors also dried meat (umqwayiba) on the rafters of the straw ceiling. There were no hotels then, so it was food for long journeys. They didn’t carry bottled water which has littered the world. There were streams and waterfalls in our land, before ‘civilization’ and PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT signs, on the fence.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.