A Cape Malay cooking class in Bo-Kaap

The street turns colour before it turns warm

Bo-Kaap is the Cape Town neighbourhood that appears in every photograph of the city with the pastel-painted terraced houses. The photography does not lie about the colour — the cobblestone streets of Wale and Chiappini and Rose Streets are genuinely that saturated, the houses in yellow and orange and turquoise and pink against the grey winter Cape sky. What the photography consistently fails to capture is that Bo-Kaap is a neighbourhood, not a backdrop. People live here. Many of those people are third- or fourth-generation descendants of the Cape Malay community whose presence in this part of Cape Town traces back to the VOC (Dutch East India Company) period when enslaved and indentured workers from the Indonesian archipelago, Madagascar, and other parts of the Indian Ocean were brought to the Cape.

We arrived at the house at 9am on a Saturday in July 2023. The family had been running cooking classes from the kitchen for six years. Our host, Fatima, is a woman in her mid-fifties whose mother and grandmother both cooked the same dishes that we were going to prepare. The great-grandmother, she told us, arrived in Cape Town from what is now Indonesia sometime in the early twentieth century.

What Cape Malay cooking actually is

Cape Malay cuisine is a synthesis. The people who created it brought spice knowledge from the Indonesian and Indian Ocean islands — cardamom, turmeric, fennel seed, tamarind — and applied it to the ingredients available at the Cape: lamb from the farms of the interior, fish from the Atlantic, dried fruit brought in on trade ships. The resulting cuisine is aromatic and layered in a way that differs from Indian cooking (less heat, more tamarind and sweet spice) and from Dutch-influenced Afrikaner cooking (which tends toward the plain and starchy).

The signature dishes are: bobotie (a spiced minced lamb bake, topped with an egg custard, usually served with yellow rice and apricot chutney), sosaties (skewered lamb with a marinade of apricot, tamarind, and masala spices, originally cooked on open fire), denningvleis (a sour lamb stew with tamarind and bay leaf), and a range of spiced rice preparations including the specific Cape Malay bredie (a slow-cooked lamb and vegetable stew that uses waterblommetjies — water hyacinth buds harvested from the Cape Flats wetlands — in season).

We made bobotie and sosaties. The bobotie is more forgiving than it sounds: the spiced lamb mixture is layered into a baking dish, the egg-and-milk custard is poured over it, and it bakes until set. The most important moment is the blooming of the spices — turmeric, coriander, cumin, a specific local masala blend — in the hot butter before adding the onions, which builds the flavour base in a way that cannot be reversed if it is rushed.

What the class was and was not

The class was not a demonstration with tasting. We stood at the kitchen counter and cooked. Fatima moved behind us, correcting angles and temperatures and timing. When I added the onions to the spice butter before the butter was fully hot, she moved me aside gently and reduced the heat without commentary. The kitchen smelled like the food being made rather than like a commercial kitchen trying to smell like food.

It was not a cultural immersion in any deep sense. Two hours of cooking is not an education in Cape Malay history or in the complexity of post-apartheid coloured identity politics in Cape Town — which are genuinely complex and not reduced to “vibrant heritage neighbourhood.” But it was real cooking in a real house, with a person whose family has cooked this food for generations, and the bobotie we ate for lunch at Fatima’s kitchen table was better than the version we have eaten at any Cape Malay restaurant.

The neighbourhood walk that preceded the cooking — thirty minutes with Fatima’s nephew, through the Wale Street mosque area and the Bo-Kaap Museum — was cursory but usefully contextualising. The museum covers the history of Cape Malay settlement, the forced removals of the apartheid period (from which Bo-Kaap was partially protected by its formal designation as a coloured residential area under Group Areas), and the current gentrification pressure that is a live issue in the neighbourhood.

The tourist trap adjacent to this

The Bo-Kaap experience adjacent to the legitimate cooking class and museum visits is the phenomenon of tour groups photographing residents’ houses from the street with the residents sometimes present in frame. Several tour operators sell “Bo-Kaap walking tours” that are primarily photography tours using private homes as backdrops. This is not community engagement. It is a form of voyeurism that the neighbourhood has, politely but firmly, pushed back against through local representation and by-laws governing commercial photography.

The legitimate version — a cooking class with a resident family, an audio tour with context, the Bo-Kaap Museum — involves the neighbourhood economy rather than extracting visuals from it.

The Bo-Kaap walking tour with Cape Malay cooking class is the format that includes both neighbourhood context and the cooking experience, and it operates through resident hosts rather than external tour operators.