Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays - Food Customs and 200 Old Cape Recipes

1978. Reprint. 127pp, a frontispiece and many other black and white drawings in the text, and a 1-page catalogue. Hilda Gerber was a cookery writer in the 1930s and 40s in South Africa. She published several cookery books, and the present work, first published in 1957, is taken from a manuscript completed in 1949, and was found in her papers after her death in 1954. The work is not just a collection of recipes but a study of food habits, and a survey of a subject which has long called for treatment by an expert. The Cape Malays were the descendants of slaves and political exiles, mostly from Indonesia and Bengal, who were brought to the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th and 18th century by the Dutch East India Company, and their spices and condiments from the East, which arrived on the ships on their way back to Holland, pepped up the blander Dutch recipes in their colonial kitchens. The book is bound in the original card covers with titling on the spine and front cover and an illustration on the front cover. It is in very good condition with some shelf wear to the covers and an old price written on the top corner of the front cover. There is some rubbing to the spine ends and down the spine edges. The contents are secure and clean with no inscription.…