Cape Town by Mouth

Some of my fondest childhood memories relate to foraging for girolles with my parents at our summerhouse in Finland. Finns are spoiled when it comes to mushrooms – from May to the first frosts in November there is always something exciting in the forest. In fact Finnish forests are so bountiful with porcini that Italians fly in to pick them.

Mushroom identification at Tokai forest

When I discovered that slowfood organizes an annual mushroom foraging event in Cape Town, I got hugely excited about learning about local varieties.  It was a tough winter’s day of about 25 C when we met our fellow basket-bearing foragers at the picturesque Tokai forest. We set off in small groups to pick whatever we could find for a little identification session an hour later with a mushroom expert. Being in South Africa, our foraging activities were overseen by a troop of baboons keen to share our loot.

Lots of pretty mushrooms

I was surprised to see 20ish different types of mushrooms appear from the baskets.  To Cam’s delight one of the mushrooms was peppery- a bit like chilli. Most of the mushrooms have exciting names like blusher and deceiver and you can think of great fairy tales to go with them. There is also the death cap, which apparently lives up to its name.  Based on a quick google search it is the world’s most dangerous mushroom- glad our team didn’t pick any.  These mushrooms were brought to South Africa by settlers who transported whole trees (roots intact) from Europe. The mushrooms came along as they live in symbiosis with the trees. I was slightly disappointed that we weren’t picking native varieties. Apparently there are some edible ones but they taste like soap. So maybe not such a loss. We took home a basket of pine rings which we sauteed in butter and garlic.

Pine rings

This event was organized by Slowfood which is an international organization that promotes biodiversity, taste education and artisan producers. Slowfood organizes all sorts of fun foraging events and outings to different producers. Last week we went to a charcuterie making class.  Click here to find out more about Slowfood.

Laying out our finds

Cam and the chili mushroom

Baboon friend keeping an eye on our foraging

Cape Malay is something unique in Cape Town. Slaves arrived from Sumatra, Sri Lanka and adapted their cuisine to the Dutch colonists’ chililevels and other tastes (minced meat and custard…). Cape Malay is an interesting mix of sweet and sour with lots of fragrant spices.

Nowadays Cape Malay can be experienced in the comfort of wineland extravagance. I think the best way is to visit the Bo Kaap. Gamidah cooks up Cape Malay classics such as chicken curry, samoosas, chilibites and rotis for interested visitors and locals. You get to try your hand at folding samoosas and crunching up rotis. It is decently priced (R250 for about 2.5 hours) and she has the most infectious laugh.

Contact Pam

Pam Mc Onie
Cape Fusion Tours
Landline: +27 21 461 2437
Mobile: +27 83 235 9777
www.capefusiontours.com ­ offering a taste of the Cape