Negotiations of Social Identity and Creolisation through Recipes in South Africa and Jamaica

Abstract

This thesis examines recipes — including those featured in creative writing—to demonstrate how collectives and individuals create and sustain narratives of social identity in South Africa, with some comparison to Jamaica. The thesis draws out the longstanding sociality of food in South Africa, paying close attention to the country’s history with recipe writing and contemporary narrativizations of social identity as they take place through the recipe. In addition, creolised foods, as they are apprehended in different historical periods in South Africa, also lead to fluid principles of organisation, particularly regarding the aesthetic and narrative choices cookbook writers make. I read two novels, Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012) and Sally Andrew’s Recipes for Love and Murder (2015); one short story titled “Mrs Plum” by Es’kia Mphahlele; six recipe books: The Cape Malay Cookbook (1988) by Faldela Williams, Cass Abrahams Cooks Cape Malay – Food from Africa (2000), The District Six Huis Kombuis: Food & Memory Project (2016), Hildagonda Duckitt’s Hilda’s “Where is it?!” of Recipes (1899) and Diary of a Cape Housekeeper (1902); a poem titled “Ackee and Codfish” (1976) by Barbara Zencraft and Cecile Emeke’s 2014 short film Ackee and Saltfish. These texts emerge from differing social groups, geographies and perspectives, but all reveal the recipe’s capacity for self-imagining and the extent to which recipes narrate social and cultural histories. They showcase the interdependence of oral/embodied and written mediums. Importantly, they also show the value of the recipe form to current debates on creolisation and separationism in literary and food studies in South Africa and abroad. At its heart, the project explores the extent to which differing social groups in South Africa apprehend culinary and cultural relations through recipe writing and compares this with Jamaica’s culinary vernaculars.