History, as we know, lives not just in the pages of textbooks. Sometimes it’s right there in front of you — in the food that you eat. Take a South African-Indian dish called bunny chow. It has nothing to do with rabbits (or Hefner, for that matter) but everything to do with history.

My friend Samta Gupta, who as a consultant chef has been planning out menus for restaurants across India, has been focusing on bunny chows. She has curated the menu for Desi Roots, a restaurant in south Delhi, and added a range of bunny chows to the menu.

“This is Durban’s most famous street food — a hollowed out loaf of bread with spicy curry fillings ranging from chicken and mutton to vegetables and beans,” she says.

The dish and its name tell you the story of labourers who went from India to South Africa in the middle of the 19th century. They took their own food habits with them, but bunny chow, South Africa experts stress, was a dish that emerged out of need.

“The indentured labourer — man and wife — had to go to the fields and work,” explains Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, retired diplomat who was India’s high commissioner in South Africa. “They needed a filling snack, which they bought from the local neighbourhood eatery.”

The snack was a loaf of bread. The top was lopped off and the middle scooped out and filled with the spicy curry. The top of the bread was then put back, and the loaf wrapped in a brown paper package and sold.

“And it was a delicious one-dish meal,” says Mukherjee (who incidentally cooks a mean potjie — a South African stew simmered over long hours — but more of that on another occasion).

The labourers ate the loaf, starting from the top or the side to the mushy, spicy centre. It needed no plates, no cutlery. The loaf was the ideal takeaway, Johannesburg-based historian Dilip Menon holds.

Bunny chows remind Menon of military hotels in Madras. “It has a very south Indian meat dish taste and it’s not surprising that it originated in Durban,” says Menon, who is the director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. “It’s mostly cooked with ginger, garlic, turmeric, chilli powder and cumin seed powder with some garam masala.”

Now you’ll find bunny chow on the menu in select restaurants across the world. Chef Samta goes a step forward with them — she adds Indian flavours to the dish, and uses buns instead of loaves. She prepares a teekha sorshe chicken bunny chow — with mustard, coconut cream, kasundi and green chillies. And her pulled mutton bunny chow has the distinct Andhra flavours of curry leaves, mustard seeds and chillies.

For vegetarians, there is the panchmel sabzi bunny chow, stuffed with a mix of beans, carrots and radish, cooked with curd and tempered with panchphoron. The barbecue pork bunny chow has a stuffing of slow-cooked pulled pork with barbecue sauce and Kashmiri apples.

Bunny chows, indeed, are interesting, but what intrigues me more is the name. “The word itself is pidgin,” Menon says, pointing out that the food stall owners were mostly Gujaratis. “Bunny comes from bania, or Gujarati, and chow as in food.”

The dish is a signature item, and Mukherjee recalls how during an official visit, Omar Abdullah, then minister of state for external affairs, was taken to a small stall on the Durban beach where he ate a bunny chow for the first time. “And he loved it,” the former envoy recalls.

“It’s comfort food,” Menon stresses. And a slice of history, I would say.

Photographs by Jagan Negi;
Courtesy: Desi Roots, Delhi