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GARAM MASALA: How about some foodball?

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Looks like the maté won’t be needed now. A friend had asked about the availability in India of this herbal tea which Argentines drink obsessively, with the plan of sipping it in support as Maradona’s men played to World Cup victory. I have a pack of it somewhere, and was looking forward to offloading it since I’m not that fond of its slightly sweet, woody taste, but now I guess I’ll have to keep it till the next World Cup!
  
Is there any other global event that brings a focus, so suddenly, to the countries involved in it? The Olympics are too large and diffuse, while with something more familiar, like cricket, the problem is just that – the familiarity of the participants and their limited number means that there’s no special interest in the countries. With the World Cup, while some countries are regular and familiar, there’s also a constant supply of new countries who suddenly come in focus for the short span of the tournament: Ivory Coast, for example this time, of Ghana or Slovenia.
  
And, of course, the unexpected semi-finalists, Uruguay. I don’t know if anyone is planning an appropriate feast in support of the only non-European team left, but the few food references I’ve found to the country’s cuisine are not too inspiring. Uruguay is a small country, long dominated by Argentina (so they drink mate too, maybe I can still use my stock), but with much less of the immigration that has given the latter at least some culinary diversity. Jonathan Norton Leonard, in his book on Latin American food for the Time-Life Foods of the World series, quotes Charles Darwin’s report of supper with a large Uruguayan landowner: “two huge piles, one of roast beef, the other of boiled, with some pieces of pumpkin; besides this latter there was no vegetable, not even a morsel of bread.”
  
“This was a comparatively varied diet,” notes Leonard dryly, adding that little has changed since then. He doesn’t mention the frogs that the Oxford Companion to Food notes Uruguayans being addicted to, particularly using “the whole body to make a soup.” I’m willing to try anything, but I have to say I’m happy that a friend, purely by chance, has just brought me smoked eel from Holland, a real delicacy where the smokiness balances the rich taste of the flesh; there’s my loyalty for Tuesday’s Uruguay vs. Netherlands match decided! Spanish paella and German sausages should take care of the other possible outcomes.
  
But perhaps one should feast in tribute to the real winner of this World Cup. South Africa’s team may have been booted out in the qualifiers, but no one doubts that the country has already proved a winner by being able to host the event with such style, warmth and efficiency. Before it began many people with some familiarity with SA, including me, wondered about the misplaced priorities of hosting such an expensive event, and the way in which it let FIFA dictate all terms. But it all seems to have been such a blast, with almost only ecstatic reports coming from visitors, that SA’s huge gains in reputation simply much be acknowledged.
  
Also, as we left the fumbles and foolishnesses of the first round, and came to the real style and spirit of the quarters, SA seemed to be an even more fitting setting. Because what you realize as you drive across its wide, rolling plains, or hills that plunge to sea, or bleak beauty of its deserts, is that this is a country built on a mythic scale, perfect for this most myth-making of sporting events. SA’s scenery makes almost anything set against it heroic, so it should be no surprise that even the food in it gets to seem that way. As I wrote in a column when the Cup was starting, SA has great ingredients, but not much of a national cuisine, not least because till recently all communities could neither afford nor were allowed to sit together to eat and create it.
  
But what food exists has its symbolism from the bunny chow, the curry in a loaf of bread, that took its form because Indians weren’t allowed to let blacks sit and eat, to the sheer profusion and quality of what was available, in which the first white settlers saw the promise of the land and their justification for taking control of it. Some of this is described by Antjie Krog, one of SA’s best poets and a brilliant non-fiction writer whose book, A Change of Tongue (2003), explores the tensions of creating a new nation. In it she researches a piece, finally never written, on ‘Food and Reconciliation’ for which she has some notable meals with Afrikaner relatives: “The other cousin is making gravy. No Bisto or Maizena or soup powder here, but a cup of sherry and thick cream is slowly caressed in, followed by some crumbling Roquefort cheese. Whole heads of garlic packed in like fragrant roses between the legs of mutton, hams shafted among stacks of pink baked quinces.”
  
But the talk at table is not of reconciliation but only of complaint about the new government; perhaps it’s no wonder she never finished the piece. The same family though has the memory of a similarly lavish meal, similarly prepared under a hated government. This was after the Boer War when the vanquished Afrikaners had to seethe under British rule. Krog’s grandmother remembered having to cook for the Governor-General, “and all I could think of was: We are dining with the enemy. We are feeding those who have starved us,,,” Yet pride dictates that the meal must be amazing, even if it requires the services of an aunt so obsessive about making perfect puff-pastry that she gets up at 4 a.m., when it is coolest, and hence best for mixing the butter and flour, and for further effect, she locks herself in the kitchen and takes off her clothes so that she does not sweat and melt the butter! Her grandmother writes:
  
“The Governor-General had a choice of pies, venison and lamb, Afrikaner hump in brine with sweet mustard, three turkeys stuffed with prunes and figs, five geese stuffed with cumquats from the colony, three enormous hams with their skins in crackling shards in separate dishes, six larded legs of springbok marinated for a week in buttermilk, accompanies by two buckets of funeral rice (yellow rice with raisins), a bucket of pumpkin with cinnamon and aniseed, a bucket of green-bean bredie stewed with sheep’s tails, a cauldron overflowing with baked potatoes and twenty bowls of Ma Lenie’s famous tomato salads… with the coffee we served milk tart, koeksisters and Aunt Stoffie’s feather light jam puffs and paper-thin slices of guava in port. As an unexpected surprise Ma Lenie ordered biltong and cream for the aftertaste…”
  
I wonder how much biltong has been eaten during the World Cup. This snack of spiced dried meat, usually beef, but also more exotic meats like ostrich and kudu, is such a favorite in SA it’s sold in petrol stations so drivers can fuel themselves as well as their cars. Such petrol station biltong is usually nasty stuff, but really good quality biltong is worth seeking out, with an addictive saltiness that makes it alarmingly easy to eat in large amounts. One of Krog’s most evocative passages is being taught by her mother how to make it after an ox is killed at home, learning that “every biltong has a name and she teaches me: this one is called ‘the eye’, that one is ‘the red meneer’, here is ‘the round one’ and there the soft threadlike ‘garingbiltong’, which she gently tears from the backbone. A shuddering, compact hump of meat becomes a layered basket of muscle, names and textures – embroidered with fat.”
  
Biltong gets its quality from the cattle lovingly tended by Afrikaner farmers, and this, as in so much else, they have in common with the African pastoralist tribes. Krog writes: “In Setswana cattle are known as modimo o nko metsi – the god-with-the-wet-nose. Among the Basotho, cattle are not merely a sign of wealth, but an expression of the collective self… A Tswana saying claims: A fool who owns an ox is no longer a fool. Cattle make a human being of you.” Revering their cattle, the tribes ate them much less than the Afrikaners, but meat was always the most prized food. Nelson Mandela writes in his biography of growing up on maize, sorghum, beans and pumpkins, not because they were much liked, “but because the people could not afford anything richer.”
  
He writes of boys like him wandering the countryside “to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink the warm, sweet milk straight from the udder of the cow.” In prison he was to know years of only the most basic food like maize porridge, but as with all prisoners, even this was prized, food becoming a source of power. He described the dilemma posed when one warder threw a sandwich on the ground, “treating us as animals to whom he could throw a bit of slop.” Yet, Mandela reasoned, it was still a gesture of some kind, and while he didn’t eat it himself, he allowed a comrade to do so. The strategy worked for the warder became less wary, and even something of a friend.
  
Mandela’s prison experiences with food are paralleled by the one part of SA’s food history that connects with us, with Mahatma Gandhi. It was in prison in Johannesburg, while fasting over a diet that he felt was inappropriate for Asians, that Gandhi learned how fasting could coerce the authorities who wanted their prisoners alive. SA was also where Gandhi first really started experimenting with food, replacing his standard Indian vegetarian food, with all sorts of experiments with fruits and raw food, a fascination he would retain all his life. And SA was the scene for Gandhi’s first march, of Indian laborers marching against laws that denied them access into much of the country.
  
In his book Satyagraha in South Africa Gandhi wrote: “Bread and sugar consisted our sole ration, but how was a supply of bread to be ensured on the eight days march?” But here, and it was not to be for the first time, Gandhi found that among the same people they were marching against, were some willing to help. A European bakery agreed to supply them at each place they stopped in: “The baker did not take advantage of our awkward plight to charge us higher than the market rates and supplied bread made of excellent flour. He sent it in time by rail, and the railway officials, also Europeans, not only honestly delivered it to us, but took good care of it in transit and gave us some special facilities.” It was an example of how goodwill could be found, and made use of even among theoretical opponents – just one of the many lessons that Gandhi learned in SA, to use in India.


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