Calulu of Angola: An Interview with Teresa Cohen

HAMILTON: How long have you been making calulu?

COHEN: I've been eating calulu since I was a child, and I started making it when I was a teenager.

HAMILTON: Is it a family tradition? If so, tell me about how it fits into your family's culinary tradition.

COHEN: It is indeed a family tradition. Since my grandmother and mother are from the city of Luanda, and that region of Angola is where calulu got its start, they always made the dish. They prepare it in the following way. They first clean slice the fish and then place it in a pot with the matira (a kind of squash), eggplant, onion, a small tomato, sweet potato, and palm oil.

HAMILTON: Is it made during special occasions? Is it made whenever anyone cares to make it? Is it part of your family's weekly food consumption?

COHEN: Yes, it is often the main dish for holiday lunches or dinners. But some people have it almost every Saturday. And my family likes to have it often, at least once a week. And in my childhood home only my mother and grandmother prepared calulu, never the household help who usually did the cooking.

HAMILTON: How much does it cost to make the dish?

COHEN: In the past calulu was relatively cheap to make. In the southern city of Benguela, where I was born and raised, fish was cheaper than meat. It still is. The sweet potato, the matira leaves, and the eggplant in those days, during colonial rule, were considered to be black folks' vegetables. For that reason, whites, considered to be upper class, did not eat them. In other words, because these vegetables were taken to be "black folks' food," they cost less.

HAMILTON: Do the poor or the rich, or both, prepare and eat calulu?

COHEN: When I was growing up in Benguela poor white folks ate sardines, which were then considered to be a "lower class" fish, looked down on by the upper class. On the other hand, those whites who had familial association with Africans did eat what blacks and the mixed-race folks dined on. And during colonial times in Benguela, there were many whites with such associations. Especially in Benguela there were many Portuguese men who were married to black and mixed-race women. It's for that reason that in Angola, Benguela is well known for its miscegenation.

HAMILTON: It's worth noting that many of the Portuguese who settled in Angola were indeed working class. A goodly number of the white settlers in rural areas were farm workers or miners, and in cities and towns many were crafts people, such as shoemakers, and restaurant and hotel employees. We also should note that when Angola gained its independence in 1975 there was a mass exodus of white settlers. Today whites are estimated to constitute about 1 percent of Angola's population of nearly thirteen million, and around 4 percent of the residents are mixed-race. Speaking of miscegenation, please tell me about your own mixed-race background.

COHEN: Well, my maternal grandmother Maria Vicente was a Bessangana of the Kimbundu ethnic group. She was born in 1892 and raised in Luanda where she passed away in 1981. Her husband, my grandfather, was José Cohen, the son of Augustus Cohen, a Caucasian Jew from Great Britain. José Cohen married my grandmother Maria da Silva, a mixed-race woman from Luanda. My grandfather was a merchant, and his father, my great grandfather, was the British Consul in Angola and the Congo. My maternal grandmother and grandfather parented four children, their third daughter being Rosa Cohen, my mother. On my paternal side my great grandfather Miguel Menezes dos Santos was born in Sardoal, Spain. He was of Gypsy background, and he migrated to Angola, to the city of Benguela, where he pursued his occupation as a businessman who sold textiles and other goods. There in Benguela he married Rita dos Santos, a woman of black African Ganguela ethnicity and white Portuguese origin. The couple had eight children, my grandfather...