South African cuisine

Potjiekos, literally translated "small pot food", is a stew prepared outdoors in a traditional round, cast iron, three-legged pot. This one is being cooked on a barbecue.
Location of South Africa

The cuisine of South Africa can be generalised as:

Indigenous cookery

In the precolonial period, indigenous cuisine was characterised by the use of a very wide range of foods including fruits, nuts, bulbs, leaves and other products gathered from wild plants and by the hunting of wild game. The introduction of domestic cattle and grain crops by Bantu speakers who arrived in the southern regions from central Africa since 10,000 BC and the spread of cattle keeping to Khoisan groups enabled products and the availability of fresh meat on demand. The pre-colonial diet consisted primarily of cooked grains, especially sorghum, fermented milk (somewhat like yogurt) and roasted or stewed meat. At some point, maize replaced sorghum as the primary grain, and there is some dispute as to whether maize, a Central American crop, arrived with European settlers (notably the Portuguese) or spread through Africa before white settlement via Africans returning from the Americas during the era of the slave trade. People also kept sheep and goats, and communities often organised vast hunts for the abundant game; but beef was considered the absolutely most important and high status meat. The ribs of any cattle that were slaughtered in many communities were so prized that they were offered to the chief of the village.

In many ways, the daily food of South African families can be traced to the indigenous foods that their ancestors ate. A typical meal in a South African family household that is Bantu-speaking is a stiff, fluffy porridge of maize meal (called "pap," and very similar to American grits) with a flavourful stewed meat gravy. Traditional rural families (and many urban ones) often ferment their pap for a few days – especially if it is sorghum instead of maize – which gives it a tangy flavor. The Sotho-Tswana call this fermented pap, "ting."

The vegetable is often some sort of pumpkin, varieties of which are indigenous to South Africa, although now many people eat pumpkins that originated in other countries. Rice and beans are also very popular even though they are not indigenous. Another common vegetable dish, which arrived in South Africa with its many Irish immigrants, but which has been adopted by South Africans, is shredded cabbage and white potatoes cooked with butter.

For many South Africans meat is the centre of any meal. The Khoisan ate roasted meat, and they also dried meat for later use. The influence of their diet is reflected in the common Southern African love of barbecue (generally called in South Africa by its Afrikaans name, a "braai") and biltong (dried preserved meat). As in the past, when men kept cattle as their prized possession in the rural areas, South Africans have a preference for beef. Today, South Africans enjoy not only beef, but mutton, goat, chicken and other meats as a centrepiece of a meal. On weekends, many South African families have a "braai," and the meal usually consists of "pap and vleis", which is maize meal and grilled meat. Eating meat even has a ritual significance in both traditional and modern South African culture. In Bantu culture, for weddings, initiations, the arrival of family members after a long trip and other special occasions, families will buy a live animal and slaughter it at home, and then prepare a large meal for the community or neighbourhood. Participants often say that spilling the blood of the animal on the ground pleases the ancestors who invisibly gather around the carcass. On holiday weekends, entrepreneurs will set up pens of live animals along the main roads of townships—mostly sheep and goats—for families to purchase, slaughter, cook and eat. Beef being the most prized meat, for weddings, affluent families often purchase a live steer for slaughter at home. Vegetarianism is generally met with puzzlement among Black South Africans, although most meals are served with vegetables such as pumpkin, beans and cabbage.

Settler cookery

A piece of droëwors, a dried sausage
An example of bunny chow, served in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

Huguenots brought wines as well as their traditional recipes.

During the pioneering days of the 17th century, new foods such as biltong, droëwors (dried sausage) and rusks evolved locally out of necessity.

Cape Dutch

A very distinctive regional style of South African cooking is often referred to as "Cape Dutch". This cuisine is characterised by the use of spices such as nutmeg, allspice and chili peppers. The Cape Dutch cookery style owes at least as much to the cookery of the slaves brought by the Dutch East India Company to the Cape from Bengal, Java and Malaysia as it does to the European styles of cookery imported by settlers from the Netherlands, and this is reflected in the use of eastern spices and the names given to many of these dishes. The Cape Malay influence has brought spicy curries, sambals, pickled fish, and variety of fish stews.

Bobotie is a South African dish that has Cape Malay origins. It consists of spiced minced meat baked with an egg-based topping. Of the many dishes common to South Africa, bobotie is perhaps closest to being the national dish, because it isn't commonly found in any other country. The recipe originates from the Dutch East India Company colonies in Batavia, with the name derived from the Indonesian bobotok. It is also made with curry powder leaving it with a slight "tang". It is often served with sambal, a hint of its origins from the Malay Archipelago.

Indian cookery

Curried dishes are popular with lemon juice in South Africa among people of all ethnic origins; many dishes came to the country with the thousands of Indian labourers brought to South Africa in the nineteenth century. The Indians have introduced a different line of culinary practices, including a variety of sweets, chutneys, fried snacks such as samosa, and other savoury foods. Bunny chow, a dish from Durban (which has a large Indian community) consisting of a hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with curry, has adapted into mainstream South African cuisine and has become quite popular.

Beverages

Main article: Beer in South Africa
Mageu is a traditional South African non-alcoholic drink, popular among many of the Nguni people, made from fermented mealie pap. Home production is still widely practised, but the drink is also available at many supermarkets.

Beer has been an important beverage in South Africa for hundreds of years among indigenous people long before colonisation and the arrival of Europeans with their own beer drinking traditions. Traditional beer was brewed from local grains, especially sorghum. Beer was so prized that it became central to many ceremonies, like betrothals and weddings, in which one family ceremoniously offered beer to the other family. Unlike European beer, South African traditional beer was unfiltered and cloudy and had a low alcohol content. Around the turn of the centuries, when white owned industry began studying malnutrition among urban workers, it was discovered that traditional beer provided crucial vitamins sometimes not available in the grain heavy traditional diet and even less available in urban industrial slums.

When South Africa's mines were developed and Black South Africans began to urbanise, women moved to the city also, and began to brew beer for the predominantly male labour force – a labour force that was mostly either single or who had left their wives back in the rural areas under the migrant labour system. That tradition of urban women making beer for the labour force persists in South Africa to the extent that informal bars and taverns (shebeens) are typically owned by women (shebeen queens). Today, most urban dwellers buy beer manufactured by industrial breweries that make beer that is like beer one would buy in Europe and America, but rural people and recent immigrants to the city still enjoy the cloudy, unfiltered traditional beer.

Compared to an American, Korean or western European diet, milk and milk products are very prominent in the traditional Black South African diet. As cows were considered extremely desirable domestic animals in precolonial times, milk was abundant. In the absence of refrigeration, various kinds of soured milk, somewhat like yogurt, were a dietary mainstay. A visitor to any African village in the 1800s would have been offered a large calabash of cool fermented milk as a greeting. Because milk cows allowed women to wean their children early and become fertile more quickly, local cultures had a number of sayings connecting cattle, milk and population growth, such as the Sotho-Tswana saying, "cattle beget children." Today, in the dairy section of South Africa's supermarkets, one will find a variety of kinds of milk, sour milk, sour cream, and other modern versions of traditional milk products.

Restaurants and fast food outlets

South Africa can be said to have a significant "eating out" culture. While there are some restaurants that specialise in traditional South African dishes or modern interpretations there of, restaurants featuring other cuisines such as Moroccan, Chinese, West African, Congolese, and Japanese can be found in all of the major cities and many of the larger towns. In addition, there are also a large number of home-grown chain restaurants, such as Spur and Dulce Cafe.

There is also a proliferation of fast food restaurants in South Africa. While some international players such as Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wimpy are active in the country, they face stiff competition from local chains such as Nando's, Galito's, Steers, Chicken Licken, Barcelos, and King Pie. Many of the restaurant chains originating from South Africa have also expanded successfully outside the borders of the country.

Typical South African foods and dishes

Koeksisters
Hertzoggie
Raw boerewors
Buckets of samp
Chakalaka relish

See also

References

    • Coetzee, Renata, 1977. The South African Culinary Tradition, C. Struik Publishers, Cape Town, South Africa.
    • Leipoldt, C. Louis, 1976. Leipoldt's Cape Cookery, Fleesch and Partners, Cape Town, South Africa.
    • Van Wyk, B. and Gericke, N., 2000. People's plants: A guide to useful plants of Southern Africa, Briza, Pretoria, South Africa.
    • Wylie, D., 2001. Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA., United States of America.
    • Routledge Encyclopaedia of Africa – Farming
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