food
Lauren Shantall
The very first time I tasted one, I was on a seaside holiday and knee-high to my grandmother, who leaned forward into a fading show of dune flowers to pluck a few of their odd, fleshy fruits. These were surprisingly sharp and juicy in all that blurry heat and beach grit.
I hardly recognised the succulents when I saw them again years later at the launch party of a swanky architectural firm in Durban. They had morphed into small, shriveled bark-like thingies, proffered among bite-size bunny chows and other newly chic “local” foods deemed suitable for politically correct palates.
Because I had no idea I wasn’t supposed to chew and swallow the tough peel, the snacks unfortunately tasted as leathery as they looked and I still had no idea what they were.
It took an encounter with a Malay fruit-seller hawking the stuff on the streets of Cape Town to put me straight. Suurvye. Sour figs. Hottentot figs. Vygies they look not unlike the flowers or Carprobrotus Edulis, if you care for fancy scientific labels.
I learned swiftly that you should bite off the dried stem at the base in order to suck out the clear juicy pulp and tiny brown seeds before tossing the rest aside. The skin, as already discovered, is flavourless and unforgiving.
Carpobrotus fruit have a startling taste: sometimes bitter, sometimes dry and never, ever sweet. They are deliciously sour, tinged with the barest trace of fructose. Not quite love at first bite for some, but an addiction for those long past the initial, extraordinary hit.
Sour figs are a well-known delicacy in the Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. They’re particularly popular among the Malay community, where marriages go sour, figuratively speaking. The figs make a traditional appearance on the banquet tables of weddings and other special events.
For the above, the fruit is peeled and made into konfyt (jam), pickles and spreads. Suurvy konfyt is especially good tangy, syrupy and, of course, not too sugary.
A good place to buy jars of homemade jam and loose dried figs is on the bustling Parade in Cape Town, in the informal take-away court known as Isaac Ospovat Place. There you’ll also find a range of Malay treats like koeksisters (coconut doughnuts), salomies (filled rootis) and gatsbys (great, stuffed rolls). Try father-and-son team Omar and Moosa Essop of Quality Foods for a regular supply of figs.
While they’re happy to part with a scoop of the goods for less than R10, they’re reticent to impart any recipes or storage methods, being stubbornly of the incestuous opinion that family secrets stay within the fold.
But James Melrose of the Boland Market Agency responsible for controlling about 80% of the figs sold on the Cape Town municipal market is less reluctant to let the cat out of the fruit bag.
The figs continue to lose moisture over time, he says, so sellers often soak them in salt water to rehydrate them. New season figs appear during summer, but are available all year round.
Annually, Melrose sells about 70 tons of dried vygies to individual stores and larger chains like Shoprite Checkers and Fruit & Veg City in Cape Town and Durban.
The vygie industry is carefully regulated. Gone are the days when figs grew plentifully in the wild all the way from Cape Point up into KwaZulu-Natal.
Over-stripping and residential development along the coastline has meant that figs now have to be grown and harvested commercially. It’s very labour-intensive, explains Albertina farmer Pieter de Jager, because figs must be handpicked and only when ripe.
The Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs’s flora and fauna division classifies the fig as a restricted foodstuff. Farmers need a license to pick and transport them, and anyone caught sticky-fingered on department land will be handed a tissue and asked to hand over a permit. Which means that if you’re keen on a sour experience that isn’t necessarily disagreeable, both you and the vygies will be far safer if harvested from your nearest fruit seller.