Sea Saraband

PHOTOS: Lean Botha | WORDS: Dave Pepler and Allan Davies

Imagine that you are watching a ballet from high above the stage. The dancers stand immobile and then, suddenly, the performance begins. Viewed from above, the swoop, the arch, the undulation of classic dance is reduced to an interplay of lines and circles; mathematics set to music. Only in profile or half-profile can we ‘read’ the dance.

At the sea, look down into a rock pool, wait for a wave or ripple – and the dance begins. No plant or animal on earth can dance like seaweed because, beneath the water, it has overcome gravity. Firmly anchored to a pivot on the rock, it performs its entrancing saraband.

The human body can also do this, but only with the arms and the hands. Look at the old, grainy films of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, and also at newer icons such as Annie Lennox. For me, the hands and arms are the most beautiful part of the human body because they are our most complete member. Think of Marlene Dietrich’s pale hand in The Blue Angel; the motherly hands of Käthe Kollwitz; the hands of young Balinese girls.

The thick black, lustrous hair of the Japanese can be as fluid; they ascribe it to the regular inclusion of hijiki, a renowned seaweed of the region, in the diet. Kombu, an indispensable ingredient in soups, stews and rice dishes, is regarded as equally wholesome. In Valdivia, Chile, the Mapuche Indians still harvest and dry seaweed for the pot just as Darwin described them doing in his Voyage of the Beagle. The Irish, Scots and natives of North America all have traditions involving the use of seaweed and kelp forests. How odd, then, that we in Africa appear to have almost no seaweed lore.

Under seafood we should also include seaweed. This is something we tend to do far too little. ‘It’s a shame,’ the old tannie said to me, ‘that people no longer know how to eat seaweed creepers!’ In Polfyntjies vir die Proe (Tafelberg, 1963), poet and Cape food historian C. Louis Leipoldt called it seaweed creeper. Author, Jan Rabie, called it jelly weed. It was with Jan that I experienced South African edible seaweed for the first time when a friend and I looked him up in Vermont. We found him on the rocks, coming home with a bag of periwinkles. He had also collected the wax-white weed on the bleached pebbles where winter storms had tossed up a flotsam of sea bamboo. Once home, he washed and soaked it, cooked it slowly and then strained it through a cloth. He then stirred in sugar, sherry, cinnamon, cloves and lemon peel and poured the mixture into moulds. Dessert that day was sweet and sour, tart and soothing – with a whisper of the sea at the back of the tongue.

Seaweeds are unique plants, so unique that they have an order to themselves: Chromista. Chroma? The colour of sea grass and seaweed is limited to brown, red and green, but brown dominates. Does this make the underwater aquarelle gloomy? A hundred times, no. Cecil Higgs spent a lifetime painting pools and gave new definition to the underwater colour palette. Glowing pink and brown together? Yes. At low tide, look at the colour gradations where sea plants are drying out against the rocks. Forget about design, line and form. Succumb to tint and texture – and pure abstraction.

-Dave Pepler

Gardens of the ocean

Seaweeds are not strictly plants but marine algae. They have no roots because they absorb nutrients directly from the sea and they have no rigid stems because they are supported by water. This flexibility enables them to survive tides, waves and currents. They are not only crucial in the marine and terrestrial food chain but also play a vital role in enriching the earth’s atmosphere with oxygen.

Because they need light to survive, seaweeds are found only in the relatively shallow parts of the oceans, usually in depths from eight to 35 metres. Some species may be found to depths of 250m in waters that are exceptionally clear. Others grow in the zone exposed at low tide and are specially adapted to highly saline conditions and periodic drying. All these seaweeds are firmly anchored to a solid object, usually rock. Many are equipped with tiny bladders that buoy them up to bring them as close to the sunlight as possible. A number of free-floating species, such as sargassum, are also equipped with bladders.

There are three recognised groups of seaweeds, based on their pigments, which absorb light of particular wavelengths and give them their characteristic colours of green, brown or red. (These colours may change radically once out of the water.) They occur in a variety of shapes and sizes, from large kelps that form forests, to encrusting corallines. Some, especially the larger reds, are showy and attractive, while others may be inconspicuous and grow in a low ‘turf’ on the rocks. There are five to six thousand species of marine algae worldwide, over 700 of which are to be found around the coasts of southern Africa. Some are restricted to the warmer east coast, while others are found only along the chillier south. Like so much of our terrestrial flora, many are endemic.

Free from the sea

• Seaweed is packed with nutrients, minerals and trace elements, and has been used as food and fertiliser for aeons. Today, extracts are used in thousands of products, from food additives and vitamin supplements to all kinds of chemical products.

• The ingredient that gives seaweed its uniquely gelatinous quality is a pectin known as agar-agar, making it not only useful for desserts but also for thickening soups and stews. ‘All fish soups are improved by boiling some green seaweed with them,’ according to Leipoldt.

• The local seaweed industry is worth about R15 million annually, and has the potential to expand, both by greater use of existing natural resources and by farming.

• In the Far East, the Nori industry (the red seaweed Porphyra) is worth 1.5 billion US dollars annually – more than three times the entire South African fishing industry.

• No seaweed is known to be poisonous.

• Local interest in seaweed as a food was recently revived by a series of articles on edible seaweeds written by artist Louie Lemmer and published in the magazine Village Life. Like Dave Pepler, Louie learnt about seaweed from Jan Rabie and developed her recipes over many years. At the time of her death, in February 2007, she had been planning to have them published in book form. Back copies of Village Life containing her articles are available from the magazine.

– Allan Davies

More information: www.villagelife.co.za