The bunny chow is not, in its original form, a recipe. It is a decision: take a quarter, half, or full loaf of white bread, hollow out the inside, fill the cavity with curry, use the bread you removed as a lid. The decision was made in the Indian quarter of Durban, at some point in the 1940s, by someone whose name is disputed and whose circumstances are not. The most credible account holds that it was invented as a vessel for take-away food — a way for Indian restaurant owners to serve curry to Black customers who were not legally permitted to enter the restaurant under apartheid's licensing laws. The bread was the workaround. The curry inside was whatever was in the pot. What resulted was, accidentally and entirely, a perfect food.
Chef Yudhika Surender has been cooking Indian food in Durban for twenty-two years, first at her family's restaurant in Tongaat and now at her own establishment, Spice Route, in the Umhlanga precinct. Her reinterpretation of the bunny chow — which she presented at the Taste of Durban festival in February — takes the structure seriously while reconsidering everything inside it. The bread is a sourdough loaf, made with a starter she has maintained for nine years, baked to a crust that holds its form through the steam of a wet curry but yields at the exact pressure of a thumb. The curry is a lamb shoulder, slow-cooked for six hours with a masala ground in-house from whole spices, finished with fresh curry leaves and a spoonful of her grandmother's coconut milk reduction. "I am not trying to improve the bunny," she says, putting a plate in front of me at the counter of Spice Route. "I am trying to make it worthy of itself."
Two kilometres away, in a converted shipping container kitchen at the Warwick Triangle market, Sipho Ndlela is doing something rather different. Ndlela cooks from a hybrid tradition — his mother is Zulu, his father was raised in a Cape Malay household in Cape Town — and his bunny chow is an experiment in what happens when those two lineages meet in a curry. The lamb mince inside his quarter loaf is spiced with a combination of Cape curry paste and Zulu ulusu — the stewed offal dish that is as fundamental to Zulu cooking as any single thing — along with dried apricot, which adds a sweetness that reads, the first time you taste it, as almost wrong and then, a second later, as precisely right. "I didn't set out to make a fusion dish," he says. "I set out to cook what I know. This is what I know."
There is nothing wrong with innovation. But the original is original for a reason. You cannot improve the mathematics. You can only understand it better.
The third chef, Nisha Govindsamy, approaches the brief with the most austere ambition: she wants to make the bunny chow as it is served at the oldest bunny chow restaurants in the Victoria Street Market precinct — the kind that have been operating in the same location for forty years and have never once updated their menus. "My version is not a reinterpretation," she says, firmly. "It is a documentation." Her recipe uses the same spice profile as the chefs who were cooking bunny chow when she was a child: whole spices, tomato and onion base, no coconut milk, no reduction, no technique imported from a cooking school. A mutton curry that would have been recognised by the man who first hollowed out the loaf and probably would have made him feel that nothing important had been lost.
The case for why the original is still untouchable is, in the end, a case about purpose. The bunny chow solved a specific problem — how to feed someone dignity when the law had decided to withhold it — and in solving that problem it created a food that is, in its mechanics, nearly perfect. The bread absorbs the curry as you eat. The architecture of the meal changes with every bite. The vessel becomes part of the experience in a way that no bowl or plate can replicate. "There is nothing wrong with innovation," says Yudhika Surender, back at Spice Route, watching a table of four work their way through a round of bunnies at lunch. "But the original is original for a reason. You cannot improve the mathematics. You can only understand it better."
The bunny chow is now available, in various forms, in restaurants in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, and New York — a diaspora food that has travelled, as diaspora foods do, both intact and transformed. The tourists who come to Durban in increasing numbers looking for the authentic version are directed, by every food journalist and every local you ask, to the same places: the Victoria Street Market, the old establishments in the CBD, the takeaway shops that have not changed their signage since 1986. The reinterpretations by Surender and Ndlela and Govindsamy are worth eating. The original, from a place that has been serving it since before you were born, is worth the trip.
