Busting the bunny chow story

FLUFFY WHITE BREAD

- KIRU NAIDOO

IN THE food mythology of South Africa, there is a neat mantra in every storyteller, paragraph in every glossy magazine spread or lyrical blog that the bunny chow, that divine, gravy-soaked quarter-loaf of fluffy white bread hollowed out and filled with curry, was born in the 1940s among the Gujarati Hindu merchant community of Durban's Grey Street.

The dish is fabled as a quick lunch for caddies barred from the club houses of the Europeans-only golf courses or perhaps workers who needed something cheap and nourishing that could travel without packaging.

The story is repeated with such confidence that to question it feels almost like the blasphemy of asking a holy book whether it has remembered itself correctly. And yet.

What if the true origin of the bunny chow is not nearly so convenient?

What if the dish first appeared, unheralded and unnoticed, in a kitchen somewhere across the ocean, the offhand creation of a child keener on hopscotch than golf or was simply trying, on a hungry after-school afternoon to mop up curry gravy from the lunch leftovers?

One must hesitate to upset the faithful by tickling holy cows. Durban has after all embraced the bunny chow with an unquestioning pride that borders on the bravado of a well-suited evangelist.

History, like bread, is often hollowed out to make room for what we prefer to swallow. But late at night, when the archives and raconteurs have fallen silent along with the rest of the household, a book stealthily picked off the shelf in the hope that it might serve as a sleeping pill ends up having an arousing effect.