Durban Curry and Bunny Chow

Durban is a city on the southeastern coast of South Africa, the biggest city in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. The busy port faces onto the Indian Ocean and is a center both of international shipping and of the South African sugar industry. It is also a center of the 1.5 million-or-so strong ethnic Indian population in South Africa. From the 1860s through the early 20th Century, around 200,000 Indians were brought to the English colony of Natal as indentured servants to work on the sugarcane plantations, though during that time period other wealthier Indians, called “Passenger Indians,” bought their way to South Africa as British subjects. The British ended the Indian system of indentured servitude in 1920, but the disenfranchisement of Indian South Africans continued and was codified as part of apartheid in 1948 through the early 1990s when that system was dismantled.

In part because of the segregation enforced in South African society, the Indians living in Durban and elsewhere were able to preserve many of the traditions of home, including the cuisine, with some adjustments. Due to the prevalence of Indian spices coming in through the port, imported by the merchant-class Passenger Indians, Indians both free and indentured were able to recreate many of the dishes of their homeland, or near facsimiles of them with some local substitutions. From this small minority population–currently 2.6% of South Africans are ethnically Indian–originated the South African love of Indian cuisine, of chutneys like Mrs. Ball’s, of pickles like achar, and of curries like the Durban curry that forms the basis of the dish called Bunny Chow.

Durban Curry

The Durban Curry is a spicy, moderately oily, reddish curry that, according to Ishay Govender-Ypma who wrote the book Curry: Stories & Recipes across South Africa about the history and development of the South African styles of curry, descends mainly from the fiery Tamil cuisine of Chennai and the state of Tamil Nadu from which many of the Indian indentured servants were brought to South Africa. They are distinct from the more Southeast Asian-influenced curries of Cape Malay on South Africa’s west coast. They may be made with beans, jackfruit, mutton, chicken, or fish, but they will usually have a few commonalities: they’re quite spicy, with plenty of dried red chili untempered by coconut or dairy milks; they tend to incorporate tomatoes, whether in puree form or diced into chunks; they feature warm spices such as cinnamon and cardamom; and they inevitably include the mysterious and aromatic flavor of curry leaves.

My recipe for a Durban lamb curry, based closely on this one with changes made mostly due to necessity (e.g., I only had one cinnamon stick left and I was out of coriander powder) follows. It’s less red than some Durban curry photos I’ve seen, and it was not as aggressively hot as the descriptions I’ve read–next time I will up the chili powder. Still, there were no leftovers when I made it.

That instruction at the end, to serve in a hollowed out loaf of bread, may have caught your attention. That is no mistake–a Durban Curry served in a hollowed out quarter-loaf or half-loaf of bread comprises the sandwich-adjacent bread bowl feast known as Bunny Chow. As for the salad, some sources claim that no Durban curry is complete without a type of cucumber salad known as Kachumber.

Others say that “no Durban curry is complete without” a type of carrot salad called sambals.

I imagine there are a half-dozen or more other salads with equally valid claims to Durban curry authenticity. But these are the two I made.

Bunny Chow

There are competing theories as to the development of bunny chow in the mid-20th Century, though the ghettoization of Indians in Durban and the restrictions placed upon them by the dictates of apartheid feature heavily in each. Some theorize that since people of color were not allowed to congregate in restaurants, and since Indian breads such as roti were thin and unable to contain a saucy curry without quickly disintegrating, the loaf of bread wrapped in wax paper provided a sturdy and cheap carryout container for the dish, ordered at the back door of the restaurant away from the view of its white patrons. Others claim that the bread wrapper allowed Indian laborers toiling in the sugarcane fields to bring along a portable and high-calorie meal for their shifts. Still others point to the Indian caddies working far from the Indian quarter at the Royal Durban Golf Course, who were not allowed sufficient break time to leave the course and get a meal, so instead had these bread-wrapped curries brought in for them by friends and family.

In any case, the origin of the name is more widely agreed-upon, and does not indicate any leporine content to the curry, either in its original form or in what is served today. The name for the merchant class of Indians who owned and operated the shops making and selling the curries was bania, which came to be shortened to bunny. And chow, as elsewhere, is slang for something to eat. So “bunny chow” literally means food bought from the bania‘s shop.

For my attempt at the sandwich, I started with a nice square-ended loaf of Pullman-style bread I bought at La Fruteria, an Afro-Caribbean market in the far Southeast side neighborhood called South Chicago, just around the corner and up the street from Calumet Fisheries on 95th Street. The loaf is by a commercial bakery in Ohio called Thomas Star and despite being distributed mainly to African markets around the upper Midwest doesn’t have much to do directly with South Africa.

However, the nice flat rectangular edges will allow it to sit up stable on one end, and the soft but springy crumb, very similar to a Japanese milk bread, should be able to soak up a ladle or two of curry sauce without disintegrating. It’s perfect for Bunny Chow.

Rather than a quarter or a half, I cut the bread into thirds for the Bunny Chow–and made some rice for those who weren’t keen on eating their curry out of a bread bowl. To hollow out the end, I used my bread knife, slicing into the cut end about 3/4″ from each side, down close to the end (but not too close, as I didn’t want to puncture the bottom of my “bowl”!) Then I worked my fingers down into the opening and pulled out as close to a rectangular piece of bread as I was able.

It took more than two 8 ounce ladlefuls of curry to fill this third of a loaf. My version o fthe Durban curry is an orangish/reddish brown, less brilliantly colored than some of the versions I’ve seen online, and could maybe use some more Kashmiri chili powder and/or tomato paste to boost its color a bit. But the flavor is very good and so is the texture, the lamb juices and tomatoes combining to form a savory gravy, thickened by the starch of the potatoes and lent complexity by the combination of warm and aromatic curry spices. The curry leaves I used were frozen and did not impart as complex a mix of flavors as fresh would have but their earthy and pungent notes were there, with their citrusy brightness amplified by the chopped cilantro.

The chunk of bread crumb scooped out to make way for the curry filling is served with the bunny chow, intended to be used as a condiment–one dips the bread into the curry, sopping up gravy and pulling out chunks of meat or beans or potatoes as one goes. I personally found a spoon helpful though, especially when integrating the side salads into a bite. A tomato, cucumber, and onion salad like kachumber is a universally good foil for rich meat stews like this curry, and here was no exception, the acidity of lemon, the coolness of mint, the brightness of cilantro, even the crunch of the cucumbers and onions providing flavor and textural contrasts to the rich, fatty, savory sauce. The carrot sambals salad provided less crunch, but the spicy, sweet, and vinegar-sour flavors cut through the meatiness of the curry just as well as as the kacumber. Of course the achar was also an ideal condiment for this dish, the spicy/salty/sour flavor of pickled green mango offset by the strangely overpowering maple syrup-like sweetness of toasted fenugreek seed.

I have already received requests to make this curry again, and my two grown sons, who happened to be on hand for this meal, both asked for (and received) the recipe as well. I look forward to hearing of their experiments with Durban Curry, though I don’t expect that they will necessarily serve it in a bowl of bread. As much as I enjoy sandwiches, I found this delivery system to be unwieldy as well, though the curry gravy-soaked bread at the end really was a treat. Still, I think I’d rather make roti and invent the Bunny Chow burrito. I will eat it quickly enough that disintegrating roti shouldn’t be a problem.