Recettes

What Kind of Alcohol Is Amarula?

The marula tree, Sclerocarya birrea, is native to the miombo woodlands of southern Africa and holds a place in the region that goes well beyond its fruit. It is called the elephant tree because elephants travel long distances for the fallen fruit and will ram the trunk to dislodge more. It is also called the marriage tree: the fruit is held to have aphrodisiac properties, it features in fertility rituals, and tribal weddings are still conducted beneath its branches. The fruit itself is small, with a light yellow skin and white flesh, and it has been eaten and fermented in southern Africa for a very long time. What most people outside the region know it for is Amarula, the cream liqueur launched by South Africa's Southern Liqueur Company in 1989, following the marula spirit released in 1983. It is now sold in over a hundred countries at 17 percent alcohol by volume, made from sugar, cream and a spirit distilled from marula fruit rather than the whisky or brandy base most cream liqueurs use. This entry is worth reading carefully because of what it actually contains. The article above describes a commercial product. The recipe attached to it is a homemade cream liqueur made with whiskey, which is a different drink and one the article itself distinguishes Amarula from.

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1 hr 30 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Umqombothi

Umqombothi is Xhosa beer, brewed from maize meal, maize malt and sorghum malt. It is thick, cloudy, sour smelling and low in alcohol, usually under three per cent, and it is not made to be compared with lager. It is a different category of drink with a different purpose. Its purpose is ceremonial before it is social. In Xhosa practice umqombothi is brewed for the return of the abakwetha, the young men coming back from ulwaluko, the initiation and circumcision rite. It is central when families communicate with the amadlozi, the ancestors, and it appears at traditional weddings, funerals and imbizo, the community meetings where matters are decided. A gathering of consequence has umqombothi at it, and its absence would be noticed as a statement. The drink is not confined to South Africa. Sorghum beer is brewed across the continent under many names: dolo in Burkina Faso, pito in Nigeria, ingwebu among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe, which is their word for froth. Brewing is done outdoors over an open fire, cooled at ambient temperature, and the recipes are held within families and passed down rather than written.

3 days 1 hrHardSouth Africa

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Rooibos Tea (Red Bush Tea)

Rooibos leaves brewed in water and served with or without milk. It is South African, and it is one of very few plants used as a tea that grows nowhere else on earth. Rooibos means red bush in Afrikaans, and the plant, *Aspalathus linearis*, grows only in the Cederberg, a small mountainous area of the Western Cape. Attempts to cultivate it elsewhere have consistently failed, which makes it genuinely unusual: not a plant that happens to be associated with a region but one that is confined to it. The European Union granted it protected designation of origin status in 2021, the first African food to receive it. It is not tea in the botanical sense. Rooibos contains no *Camellia sinensis* and therefore no caffeine at all, and it has very little tannin, which is why it does not turn bitter however long it brews. That is the practical difference: black tea over-steeped becomes astringent, rooibos simply becomes stronger. Red rooibos is oxidised after harvest, which is what produces the colour and the sweeter, fuller flavour. Green rooibos is unoxidised, lighter and more expensive. The source's health claims have not been carried across.

20 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Homemade Peppermint Liqueur

Sugar syrup flavoured with peppermint oil and coloured green, then combined with brandy. It is a homemade version of peppermint schnapps, and it is an alcoholic spirit rather than a soft drink. Nothing about it is African. Peppermint schnapps is a European and North American drink, most strongly associated with the winter holidays in the United States, where it is drunk as a shot or mixed into creamy cocktails. Commercially it is made by adding peppermint flavouring to a clear grain spirit; this domestic version uses brandy instead, which gives a warmer and less neutral result. The source attributes its invention to a Parisian confectioner around 1810 and credits Napoleon's second wife with carrying the recipe to Austria. That story is repeated in a number of places and is not documented in any reliable source. It is recorded here as a claim rather than as fact. Two practical warnings. This is a strong spirit, the brandy is not cooked off, since it goes in after the syrup has cooled, so treat it accordingly. And it contains green food colouring, which is purely cosmetic and can simply be left out.

20 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de FoodChef · Africook