Cape Malay curry

In the Cape Malay kitchen, cooks often have their own names for the spices: borrie for turmeric, jeera for cumin, koljander for coriander and barishap for fennel. Curry here is an everyday dish of mutton, chicken, mince or beans, served with rice or roti. It relies on aromatic spices such as turmeric, coriander, cardamom, fennel seed and cinnamon, with a generous amount of tomato.

Compared with the hot, red curries of Durban, the Cape style is milder and slightly sweeter. The Afrikaans word kerrie, taken from Malay or Tamil, was in print at the Cape by the 1880s.

The Sunday Times has described how enslaved women, who did much of the cooking in Dutch colonial kitchens, brought Eastern spices to the food they prepared, a history that shaped Cape curries, bredies and pickled fish alike.