Bunny chow Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Bunny chow arose in Durban, South Africa, in modern times, between the later nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The dating is firm, and the framing is unshaken: this is a dish of the Indian community that put down roots in Durban. What is not settled is the origin story—who first made it, and in what setting—where several accounts stand side by side without resolution.

The wheat loaf that forms the vessel, the spices that go into the curry, the beans, the meat: all are staples long present in the Old World, and all were to hand in any kitchen. What was new was not the ingredients but the people who brought them. In 1860 a ship carrying indentured labourers for the sugar plantations arrived from India at Natal, and from then on an Indian way of life took hold in the region. Only once Indian curry was a regular presence at their tables did the ground exist for this portable meal to arise.

Its shape was decided by the working life of the port city of Durban. The inside of a firm loaf is scooped out, and the hollow is filled with a soupy curry. No plate, no cutlery: it can be held in one hand and eaten within a short break. That practicality became the form of the dish itself. Its emergence is placed in the 1940s, and it spread as a cheap, quick meal that filled a labourer's stomach.

Bunny chow has long come with a sad origin story of a distinctly South African kind. Under apartheid, it is said, Indian people were allowed neither to carry a knife nor to enter a restaurant, and so the golf-course caddies and the street labourers packed their curry into a hollowed-out loaf to carry it away.

But the sequence of this story does not fit. Apartheid was enacted into law in 1948, yet bunny chow was already being eaten in the 1940s. If the dish existed before the discriminatory system was in place, then 'discrimination gave rise to this dish' cannot stand. It is a later, heavy history read back onto the dish's beginnings.

The accounts that do not lean on the system sit better with the timeline. The one that reaches furthest back holds that indentured labourers on the sugar plantations, eating quickly during a short break, packed the filling into bread in place of a leaf. Another says that an Indian merchant running a lunch counter on Grey Street in Durban sold it. The vegetarian restaurant Kapitan's, which traded from 1912 for many decades, is said to have served the first bean bunny chow.

The name, too, ties back to the merchants. The Oxford English Dictionary favours deriving it from bania, a merchant caste of northern India: the Gujarati merchants of Grey Street were called bania, and their dish became bunny chow (chow being South African English slang for food). That said, the earliest written record of the word is from 1972, some thirty years after the dish was born in the 1940s. The year a word enters the dictionary and the year a dish comes into being are two different things.

In the end, who made it first cannot be decided today, for the contemporary records are thin. Even so, the three accounts share the same makers—the Indian labourers of Durban—and the same use: a portable meal to be eaten cheaply and quickly. Bunny chow reads less as a dish with a single inventor than as one that took its form naturally from the lives of people who had crossed the sea.