Recettes

Pork Trotters

Pork trotters are the foot and ankle of the pig, and almost all of what they offer is collagen. Cooked for hours they break down into something gelatinous and rich that thickens its own liquid, and they are eaten both as a full meal with gravy and as something picked at with the fingers. In South Africa the trotter carries a specific history. Trotters, like offal, were what was left over, the parts of the animal that commercial butchery and the households that could afford choice cuts did not want. They were what was available to people who had been made poor by law. The black community took the trotter and made it a dish with its own standing rather than a marker of scarcity, and that transformation is what the dish now carries. It is claimed rather than merely eaten. It is served with pap, the maize porridge that takes up the gravy, and it appears at home meals and at gatherings without being reserved for either. The long cook is unavoidable, which makes it food for a day when you are in the house anyway.

South Africa3 hr 35 minTshego Stone

Pap En Vleis

Pap en vleis is Afrikaans for porridge and meat, and the name describes the whole of it. Maize meal cooked to a smooth, firm mass, and grilled meat beside it. Two components, no sauce required, and a dish that the entire country recognises regardless of which language its household speaks. Its natural setting is outdoors and social. Pap en vleis is what comes off a braai and what is served at a shisanyama, the grill and gathering place where meat is bought, cooked over open fire and eaten on site. The dish exists in the same space as the fire and the people standing around it, and eating it indoors at a table is possible but slightly beside the point. Maize is the foundation of the South African diet, and pap is its most direct expression: nothing added, nothing disguised, judged entirely on texture. The meat is whatever the household or the grill has, and its variability is why the dish has stayed universal rather than becoming the property of any one community. A dish defined by two nouns leaves room for everyone's version.

South Africa55 minLaila

Pap and sous, South African maize porridge served with a tomato and onion gravy

Pap & Sous

Pap and sous is maize porridge with tomato gravy, and between them they account for a very large share of what is eaten in South Africa on an ordinary day. Pap is the smooth, firm maize meal that anchors the plate. Sous, Afrikaans for sauce, is the tomato and onion gravy that goes over it. The comparison South Africans reach for when explaining pap to outsiders is grits or polenta, and it holds up as far as the grain goes. What it misses is the position the dish occupies. Pap is not a side. It is the centre of the plate, and everything else is arranged in relation to it, which is why the quality of a household's pap is noticed and remarked on. The gravy is where the cook is visible. A sous is built from onion, pepper, chilli, garlic and tomato with paprika and a little sugar and vinegar, and every household has a version. Pap and sous is eaten on its own as a complete meal and served alongside grilled meat and boerewors when there is a fire going, which is the same dish playing two different roles depending on the day.

South Africa1 hrChef.donkey

Creamy Samp

Samp is dried maize kernels, stamped to crack the hulls and break the grain into coarse pieces. It is eaten in place of rice or mealie meal across South Africa, and it holds a chewy, distinctly grainy texture that neither of those has. Different communities cook it differently: with beans as umngqusho, on its own with a little seasoning, or with meat worked through it. Its defining property used to be time. Conventional samp takes about three hours, which puts it beyond a weekday for most households and placed it firmly at weddings, traditional ceremonies and funerals. There is a South African joke that turns on exactly this: warn someone about risky behaviour and the reply is that everyone will eat samp at the funeral, because that was the reliable place to find it on a menu. Quick cook samp changed that. Processed to cook in around thirty minutes, it moved the dish from the occasion to the ordinary week, and the reason it caught on is as much about electricity as about time. Three hours on a stove is expensive in a country with an unreliable supply. This creamy version, finished with mushroom, cheese and milk, is what samp looks like once it stopped being ceremonial.

South Africa1 hr 10 minTshego Stone

Rwandan brochettes, goat meat skewers grilled over charcoal and served with plantain and salad

Rwandan Brochettes (Grilled Meat Skewers)

Brochettes are skewered grilled meat, and in Rwanda they are the food most reliably present wherever people gather in the evening. Goat is the usual choice, threaded onto skewers with onion, grilled over charcoal, and eaten standing at a bar, sitting in a restaurant, or bought from a street vendor on the way somewhere else. The word is French, meaning skewer, and its presence in Rwandan usage is a plain marker of the colonial period. What the word describes is entirely Rwandan: a particular cut, a particular char, and a particular way of eating, with grilled or fried plantain, potatoes and a fresh salad alongside. They are not heavily spiced, which distinguishes them sharply from the grilled meat traditions further west. Where Nigerian suya is built on a dry spice coating and West African peppered goat is aggressively hot, a Rwandan brochette is seasoned simply and relies on the meat and the fire. Heat, when it is wanted, arrives separately at the table as akabanga, the thin orange Rwandan chilli oil that is sold in small bottles and used a drop at a time. That separation of meat and heat is a matter of preference in Rwanda rather than an absence of one.

Rwanda55 minDebby

A South African kota, a quarter loaf of bread filled with chips, russian sausage, cheese and atchar

Classic South African Kota

A kota is a quarter loaf of bread, hollowed out and packed with fried food. The word is township English for quarter, and that is the whole description: bread cut in four, the soft centre pulled out, and the cavity filled with chips, polony, russians, viennas, cheese, egg, atchar and sauce, then capped with the bread that was removed. It belongs to the townships of Gauteng, where it is sold from small takeaway windows and eaten in the hand without a plate. Kota shops compete on what they will fit into a quarter loaf, and the size of the fill is a large part of the reputation. It is cheap, it is a complete meal, and it is built for people who need to eat between one thing and the next. Atchar is what makes it South African rather than generically stuffed bread. The pickled green mango relish, oily and sour and hot, came to South Africa through Indian indenture and cuts the fried starch that dominates everything else in the cavity. Kota is often described as a version of bunny chow, and the two are related without being the same: bunny chow is Durban Indian, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, and kota is a Gauteng township form filled with fried items. They share an ancestor and are not interchangeable.

South Africa40 minTshego Stone

South African lamb bredie, a slow cooked lamb stew with vegetables, cinnamon and cloves

South African Lamb Bredie (Lamb Stew)

A bredie is a South African stew with a specific structure. Where an ordinary stew is built on stock, a bredie uses very little liquid and relies on the vegetables to release their own, so the sauce that develops is made by the ingredients rather than added to them. That distinction is what the word carries. Lamb is the meat most associated with it, and the seasoning tells you where the dish comes from. Cinnamon, cloves and garlic in a meat stew is a Cape signature, reflecting the spice traditions that Cape Malay cooks brought to South African food from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. A European lamb stew does not taste like this, and the difference is entirely in the spice cabinet. Bredies are named for their vegetable rather than their meat: tomatiebredie for tomato, waterblommetjiebredie for the water hyacinth flowers that grow in Cape wetlands, green bean bredie, cabbage bredie. The lamb is the constant and the vegetable is the variable, which is the reverse of how most stew traditions name themselves. It is slow food, cooked until the lamb falls apart, and it is served with rice or bread to take up a sauce that has been concentrated rather than diluted.

South Africa2 hr 15 minDebby

Vetkoek, South African fried bread also known as amagwinya, split and filled with curried beef mince

Vetkoek (Amagwinya) and Beef Mince Curry

Vetkoek is fried bread, and the two names it carries in South Africa tell you most of what you need to know about it. Vetkoek is Afrikaans and means fat cake. Amagwinya is isiZulu, and the same round of dough is sold under that name from township stands and street corners across the country. One food, two languages, one of the clearest examples of a dish that belongs to everybody in South Africa. Its origins are Dutch and Afrikaner, in the tradition of frying a simple yeast dough that arrived at the Cape and spread inland. What it became is entirely South African. It is split and filled, most often with a curried mince, and eaten in the hand as a complete cheap meal, which puts it in the same category as the kota and the bunny chow: bread as a container for something hot. The mince curry inside is its own piece of South African history. Cardamom, cloves, cumin, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek and fennel in a beef mince is not a Dutch spice profile; it comes from the Cape Malay and Indian South African kitchens that shaped the country's food. Vetkoek filled with curried mince is therefore a Dutch fried bread holding an Indian Ocean filling, sold under a Zulu name, and nobody in South Africa finds that combination remarkable.

South Africa1 hr 10 minChef.donkey

Namibian Venison

Namibia is among the world's significant producers of game meat, and venison there means something more specific than deer. Kudu, springbok, oryx, impala and wildebeest are all farmed and hunted under conservancy systems, and the country's approach to wildlife management, which places conservation and controlled offtake in the same framework, is what allows game to be a normal food rather than an occasional one. That range of species is why Namibian venison is described in the plural. Each animal eats differently: springbok is fine grained and mild, oryx is denser and stronger, kudu sits between them. All are very lean, which is the single fact that governs how they are cooked. Fat is what keeps meat moist over long cooking, and game has almost none, so it is either cooked fast and served rare or braised long and slow with added liquid. Namibian cooking pairs indigenous foodways with the German and Afrikaner traditions left by colonial settlement, and venison appears across all of it: dried into biltong, cooked slowly in a potjie over open embers, or grilled at a braai. The recipe here takes a different route, treating the meat with a yoghurt and whole spice curry, which is a contemporary approach rather than a Namibian one.

Namibia2 hr 30 minDebby

Cape Malay Chicken Curry

Cape Malay cooking is the food of a community formed by force. From the 17th century the Dutch East India Company brought enslaved people and political exiles to the Cape from Indonesia, Malaysia, Bengal, India and Madagascar, and what they built at the southern tip of Africa, working with local ingredients and their own inherited techniques, became one of South Africa's defining cuisines. The chicken curry shows the method clearly. Cape Malay curries use whole spices dropped into the pot rather than the ground masalas of most Indian cooking, and those spices, cinnamon stick, cardamom, fennel and cumin seed, are often lifted out before serving. That produces a curry that is aromatic rather than thick and heavy, and it is one of the clearest technical differences between the two traditions. Sweetness is the other Cape Malay signature. Mango chutney and a little sugar go in near the end, and that sweet note against the chilli and the spice is what people recognise. It is served with Cape Malay yellow rice, coloured with turmeric and studded with raisins, along with roti and a fresh sambal of tomato, onion and cucumber. The community's food is now eaten across every South African community, which is a legacy no one who was brought to the Cape in chains could have chosen or predicted.

South Africa1 hr 40 minDebby

Chocolate Malva Pudding

Malva pudding is one of South Africa's defining desserts: a soft, spongy baked pudding drenched in a hot cream and butter sauce the moment it leaves the oven, so the sponge soaks it up rather than sitting in it. This is the chocolate version, with cocoa worked into both the sponge and the sauce. Apricot jam is the ingredient that surprises people and it is not optional. It goes into the batter rather than onto the finished pudding, and its acidity reacts with the bicarbonate of soda to give the sponge its characteristic open, slightly sticky crumb. A malva pudding made without it is a chocolate sponge, which is a different and lesser thing. The dish is generally traced to Cape Dutch cooking, and the name has been variously explained through Afrikaans and through the wine sometimes served with it, with no single account settled. What is not in doubt is its position: malva pudding appears at Sunday lunches, at restaurants across the country and at every gathering where a hot pudding is expected, served with custard, cream or ice cream while it is still warm.

South Africa1 hr 10 minLaila

Bunny Chow

Bunny chow is a hollowed loaf of white bread filled with curry, and it comes from the Indian community of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal. The bread is the bowl, the plate and the cutlery, and it is eaten by tearing pieces off the hollowed lid to scoop with. Its history is tied directly to apartheid. The most widely repeated account holds that it developed as a way to sell food to Black customers who were barred from eating in certain restaurants: the bread served as the container, so nothing had to be handed back. It was cheap, portable, filling enough for a day's work, and needed no crockery, which made it well suited to the indentured Indian labourers brought to work the sugarcane fields of KwaZulu-Natal. The name is generally traced to banya chow. Banya was an older term for the Indian trading community in Durban and chow is slang for food. Accounts of the origin do differ and none is settled. The filling is a Durban curry, aromatic with curry leaves, cardamom and cinnamon, made with chickpeas and potatoes and with or without meat, and mutton is the version Durban is best known for.

South Africa50 minJennifer

Chakalaka Boerewors

Chakalaka boerewors puts two South African staples together: boerewors, the coiled farmer's sausage of beef and spice that is the centre of any braai, and chakalaka, the spiced vegetable relish of onion, pepper, carrot, chilli and beans that goes alongside almost everything. Boerewors is protected by law in South Africa. Regulations set a minimum meat content and cap the amount of cereal and fat, and coriander is the defining spice, with nutmeg, cloves and allspice alongside it. It is always sold and cooked as a continuous coil rather than in links, and cutting it into pieces before cooking, as this recipe does, is a departure from how it is usually treated. Chakalaka's origins are generally placed in the townships of Johannesburg, where it is said to have been made by mineworkers from what was available, and it has since become a national side dish served hot or cold. The two together, cooked in one pan over a fire, is home cooking rather than a documented traditional dish, and the source describes it in the first person as something the contributor made. It is included as given.

South Africa25 minLisias Johanna

Creamy Prawns

Creamy prawns are a South African restaurant and home staple, and the country's long coastline and its Cape Malay and Portuguese-Mozambican influences are why seafood sits so comfortably in its cooking. Prawns are cooked briefly with onion and garlic, lifted out, and returned to a cream sauce reduced in the same pan. Chermoula is the ingredient that places it. It is a North African marinade, Moroccan and Algerian in origin, built on coriander, cumin, garlic, paprika and lemon, and its appearance in a South African prawn dish reflects how freely spice blends move around the continent. A seafood rub carries the rest. The contributor makes a comparison worth repeating: prawns are seen as a high-end, classy food, and they describe them as the mopane worms of the ocean. Mopane worms are the caterpillars harvested and eaten across southern Africa, nutritious, cheap and utterly unglamorous outside the region. Putting the two side by side is a fair point about how arbitrary food status is, and it is the kind of observation that belongs in the record rather than being tidied away.

South Africa25 minTshego Stone

Mandazi

Mandazi is the fried bread of the Swahili coast, the strip of East African coastline running through Kenya, Tanzania and the offshore islands, where Bantu, Arab, Persian and Indian influences have been folding into one another for a thousand years. It is usually cut into triangles, though rounds and squares are common too, and it is fried until it puffs and turns gold. The dough is enriched with coconut milk and scented with cardamom, and those two ingredients place it geographically as precisely as a map would: coconut from the coast, cardamom from the Indian Ocean spice trade that made these ports what they were. It is often described as a Swahili doughnut, which is fair as a shorthand and misleading in one respect. Mandazi is considerably less sweet than an American doughnut, and it is not glazed or filled. That restraint is what makes it useful, it goes with tea in the morning, with a bean stew at lunch, or on its own from a street stall, and none of those would work with something sugary. It was once more of an occasion food, made at Christmas and for celebrations. It is now everyday, which the source attributes plainly to changing lifestyles and to more people knowing how to make it. It reheats well, which is part of why it is made in quantity.

KenyaBeatrice

Peri Peri Spiced Rice

This is rice cooked in a peri peri spiced tomato and vegetable base, served with a lemon and garlic coconut yoghurt alongside. It belongs to the southern African peri peri tradition, and no single country is named in the source. Peri peri itself is Mozambican and Angolan, built on the African bird's eye chilli that naturalised there after Portuguese traders brought chillies from South America. The seasoning blend here is a dry rub of salt, chilli, onion powder, garlic powder, ground coriander and oregano, which is the restaurant-style formulation rather than the fresh sauce. The technique is the interesting part and the contributor is emphatic about it. The rice cooks in just enough water to cover it, under a lid on a low flame, until every drop has gone, and it then rests for ten minutes untouched. The instruction in the source is in capitals: leave the rice alone, because the aim is a crust on the bottom of the pan. That is the same principle behind Persian tahdig, Senegalese thieboudienne and Spanish socarrat, and it turns a side dish into something worth the pan.

South Africa35 minChef.donkey

Jollof Pasta

Pasta cooked into a spiced tomato and pepper stew in the same way jollof rice is made, with beef and shrimp. It is West African, and no single country is claimed. The idea is a straightforward transposition and it works. Jollof rice is rice cooked in a reduced, heavily seasoned tomato and pepper base until the grains absorb it; jollof pasta does the same with pasta, and jollof couscous and jollof spaghetti are made the same way. The key is the same in all of them: fry the stew properly and reduce it to a thick paste before the starch goes in. The source is emphatic about this and right, under-fried stew gives a watery, sharp result that no amount of later cooking corrects. The title needs a note. The page is called tagliatelle pasta and the article explains what tagliatelle is at some length, but the ingredient list specifies thin spaghetti. Neither is wrong for the dish, jollof pasta is made with whatever shape is to hand, but the mismatch is worth stating, and the title here names the dish rather than a pasta shape that may not be in your cupboard. Allspice, curry powder and chicken bouillon alongside chilli is the Nigerian seasoning signature. **It contains shrimp, which the title does not indicate.**

50 minCuisine228

Shrimp Fried Rice

Cold cooked rice fried with shrimp, peas, egg, garlic, ginger and soy sauce. No country is claimed, and the page sits in Worldwide Recipes. That classification needs explaining, because the source disagrees with it. It is filed under Southern African Recipes and asserts that "the method of preparation for this African shrimp fried rice is absolutely different from any other variety including that of the Chinese people." The ingredient list does not bear that out. Soy sauce, ginger, garlic, peas and scrambled egg folded through cold rice is a standard Chinese-style fried rice, there is no palm oil, no bouillon cube, no scotch bonnet, no fried rice spice, none of the markers that make Nigerian or Ghanaian fried rice genuinely distinct. Those dishes exist and are on this site; this is not one of them. What the source gets right is the technique, and it is the only thing that really matters in fried rice. Cold leftover rice has dried out at the surface and lost the moisture that makes fresh rice clump. Fresh rice, however good, fries up mushy. The other correct instruction is cooking the egg first and setting it aside. Scrambled into the rice it disappears; cooked separately and folded back in, it stays in distinct pieces.

35 minCuisine228

South African Stewed Green Beans

Green beans cooked slowly with potato and onion until everything is completely soft, then roughly mashed and finished with butter and nutmeg. It is South African, and it is old-fashioned in the best sense. The dish exists for a specific reason and the source is refreshingly honest about it: this is what to do with green beans that have gone past their best. Beans that are too tough and stringy to steam and serve whole become excellent when cooked long and mashed, because the slow cooking breaks down exactly the fibres that made them unpleasant. It is a technique for rescuing produce rather than showcasing it, which is why it belongs to an older way of cooking. The potato is structural. It breaks down completely and binds the mash, which is why the dish holds together rather than being beans in water. Nutmeg with green beans is a Cape Dutch habit, and the same pairing turns up across South African vegetable cookery. It is not a garnish, it is what makes the dish taste South African rather than generically braised. The source is also honest that quantities do not matter much, which is true of most old traditional recipes and rarely admitted. Do not mash it to a purée. Texture is meant to survive.

South Africa50 minFoodChef

Recettes

South African Lamb Bredie (Lamb Stew)

Vetkoek (Amagwinya) and Beef Mince Curry

Pork Trotters

Pap En Vleis

Chakalaka Boerewors

Cape Malay Chicken Curry

Namibian Venison

Bunny Chow

Chocolate Malva Pudding

Creamy Samp

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Pork Trotters

Pap En Vleis

Pap & Sous

Creamy Samp

Rwandan Brochettes (Grilled Meat Skewers)

Classic South African Kota

South African Lamb Bredie (Lamb Stew)

Vetkoek (Amagwinya) and Beef Mince Curry

Namibian Venison

Cape Malay Chicken Curry

Chocolate Malva Pudding

Bunny Chow

Chakalaka Boerewors

Creamy Prawns

Mandazi

Peri Peri Spiced Rice

Jollof Pasta

Shrimp Fried Rice

South African Stewed Green Beans

Recettes

Recettes à la une

South African Lamb Bredie (Lamb Stew)

Chakalaka Boerewors

Cape Malay Chicken Curry

Namibian Venison

Bunny Chow

Chocolate Malva Pudding

Creamy Samp

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Pork Trotters

Pap En Vleis

Pap & Sous

Creamy Samp

Rwandan Brochettes (Grilled Meat Skewers)

Classic South African Kota

South African Lamb Bredie (Lamb Stew)

Vetkoek (Amagwinya) and Beef Mince Curry

Namibian Venison

Cape Malay Chicken Curry

Chocolate Malva Pudding

Bunny Chow

Chakalaka Boerewors

Creamy Prawns

Mandazi

Peri Peri Spiced Rice

Jollof Pasta

Shrimp Fried Rice

South African Stewed Green Beans