Skip to content
Cape Braai
DE
← All recipes

Side · In Afrikaans: Kerrie-noedelslaai

Three-colour curry pasta salad

Tricolour fusilli in a sweet-sour curry dressing, left overnight. In South Africa it is kerrie-noedelslaai, and no bring-and-braai is without it.

The curry pasta salad may be the most South African of all the sides, and the one that needs most explaining elsewhere: not a mayonnaise salad but a cold sauce of tomato sauce, vinegar, sugar and curry powder — the same sweet-sour axis as monkey gland sauce.

Prep
25 min
On the fire
12 min
Serves
10
Effort
easy
Pasta salad in a creamy dressing with pieces of vegetable
ozmafan · CC BY 2.0

When it goes on

Done beforehand

Made in the kitchen. On the table before you light up.

Equipment: nothing

This line

Indian Durbanfrom 1860Made at the Capelate 20th century to today

Curry as everyday food, bread as a vessel, the curry powder on the supermarket shelf.

Method

  1. Cook the pasta

    In plenty of salted water, but not soft — it carries on softening in the dressing. Drain and rinse cold so it does not stick.

  2. Whisk the dressing

    Whisk tomato sauce, vinegar, oil, sugar and curry powder in a large bowl until the sugar has completely dissolved. It takes longer than you expect — if it still feels gritty, it is not done.

  3. Combine

    Fold the cooled pasta, peppers and onion into the dressing. If you are using beans, add them now with their sauce.

  4. Overnight in the fridge

    Cover and chill for at least four hours, ideally overnight. The pasta takes up the dressing and gets stronger in flavour but also drier.

  5. Loosen before serving

    Fold through again and taste. If it seems dry, a splash of vinegar helps — not oil.

Tips

  • The amount of sugar looks wrong and is not. The dressing has to stand up to the vinegar; halve the sugar and you get a sour salad.
  • Traditionally sliced viennas or crisp bacon go in. That stops it being vegetarian and brings it closer to the original.
  • It keeps three days and is the salad you make the day before, when you already have too much on.

Ask in South Africa what to bring to a bring-and-braai and the answer is often: pasta salad. It always means the same one — tricolour spirals in an orange, sweet-sour curry sauce.

It is not a delicacy and does not want to be. It is cheap, it fills people up, it survives the heat and it is on every table with more than six people around it. And it is a good example of a flavour you meet everywhere at the Cape: sweet against sour, with curry as the join.

Leaving it overnight is not a suggestion, it is part of the recipe. Freshly made it tastes of tomato sauce; the next day it tastes of pasta salad.

After recipes by

Goes with this