Bunny Chow
As a rule, the Indian food in South Africa is fantastic. Most of it would be familiar to anyone who has frequented Indian restaurants in the U.S., but there's a few items on the menu that might make you stop short and wonder if your eyes are working correctly.
One of those is Bunny Chow.
Never fear. No baby rabbits were harmed in the making of this dish. And it is not, as my friend Rob noted during his visit, the stage name for one of the waitresses at New York's legendary Lucky Cheng's.
Bunny Chow looks like this:
It's simply a loaf of bread that's been hollowed out and filled with curry.
When Katie visited the Apartheid Museum in Durban while I was out pretending to be a foreign correspondent one day, she learned that this delicacy was invented in that city at a time when Indian shop owners were not allowed to serve blacks. So the black people would go around the back, and the loaf of bread served as a to-go container in the dark era before both South African democracy and styrofoam.
That was one theory, anyway. The other was that the Indian golf caddies had to carry their lunches with them as they followed the rich white people around the golf course with their clubs. So they stored their lunch inside the bread.
That half loaf pictured above fed both Katie and me. It cost 10 rand. That's about $1.50.
It's fun to eat. See?
That's Rob's friend Tom with Katie. Rob and Tom stayed with us for one night, becoming the first people to try out the futon we've purchased to encourage you all to come and visit. Now that we've shared Bunny Chow with him, Tom is our friend too.
Rob's pictures from his visit are online here. Tom's are here. They were in South Africa for two weeks and saw more of the country than we have in three months.
One of those is Bunny Chow.
Never fear. No baby rabbits were harmed in the making of this dish. And it is not, as my friend Rob noted during his visit, the stage name for one of the waitresses at New York's legendary Lucky Cheng's.
Bunny Chow looks like this:
It's simply a loaf of bread that's been hollowed out and filled with curry.
When Katie visited the Apartheid Museum in Durban while I was out pretending to be a foreign correspondent one day, she learned that this delicacy was invented in that city at a time when Indian shop owners were not allowed to serve blacks. So the black people would go around the back, and the loaf of bread served as a to-go container in the dark era before both South African democracy and styrofoam.
That was one theory, anyway. The other was that the Indian golf caddies had to carry their lunches with them as they followed the rich white people around the golf course with their clubs. So they stored their lunch inside the bread.
That half loaf pictured above fed both Katie and me. It cost 10 rand. That's about $1.50.
It's fun to eat. See?
That's Rob's friend Tom with Katie. Rob and Tom stayed with us for one night, becoming the first people to try out the futon we've purchased to encourage you all to come and visit. Now that we've shared Bunny Chow with him, Tom is our friend too.
Rob's pictures from his visit are online here. Tom's are here. They were in South Africa for two weeks and saw more of the country than we have in three months.
posted by Erik at 12:44 pm
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