Recettes

Boeber, a Cape Malay sweet milk drink from South Africa, served warm with slivered almonds

Boeber (Cape Malay Sweet Milk Drink)

Boeber is a Cape Malay sweet milk drink, thick with vermicelli and sago and scented with cardamom, cinnamon and rose water. It sits somewhere between a drink and a pudding, and Cape Town households do not find the ambiguity a problem. Its place in the calendar is precise. Boeber is served on the fifteenth night of Ramadan, marking the midpoint of the fast for those who have completed the first fifteen days. That single fixed date gives it a weight that a dish eaten year round does not carry: it belongs to a moment, and its appearance signals that the moment has arrived. The drink comes from the Cape Malay community, whose ancestors were brought to the Cape from Indonesia, India and East Africa, and boeber carries the marks of all three. It has close relatives across that map. Malaysians break the fast with bubur lambuk, a porridge; Trinidadian households serve sawine at Eid al-Fitr; kheer and payasam on the Indian subcontinent are its nearest kin, most likely carried to the Cape by enslaved and later indentured Indians. In South Africa itself, the Afrikaans melkkos is the comparable dish. Boeber is what all of those became in one place.

South Africa55 minJennifer

Matapa, a Mozambican dish of cassava leaves cooked with groundnuts, coconut milk and shrimp, served with rice

Mozambique Matapa Recipe

Matapa is Mozambique's cassava leaf dish, and it is where the country's two food geographies meet. Cassava leaves and groundnuts belong to the interior; coconut milk and dried shrimp belong to the Indian Ocean coast. Matapa puts all four in one pot, and the result tastes like nowhere else on the continent. It is most common in the south of the country, where the ingredients are close at hand and inexpensive, and it is everyday food rather than occasion food. Mozambican households eat it with rice or bread. The dish is also known as matata in some accounts, and the naming shifts across regions in the way that dishes carried by many communities usually do. The cassava leaves are what make it. They are finely chopped and cooked long enough to lose their fibre and their raw edge, and the groundnuts thicken the coconut milk around them into something dense and savoury. Cooks substitute spinach, kale, collard greens or pumpkin leaves where cassava leaves are hard to come by, and every Mozambican will tell you the substitution is not the same dish.

Mozambique1 hrDebby

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

Boerewors Stew

Boerewors is South African sausage, and the name is Afrikaans: boer for farmer, wors for sausage. It is coarsely minced beef, sometimes with pork or lamb, seasoned with toasted coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, and it is made in one continuous coil rather than in links. Its identity is protected in law. South African regulation sets out what may be sold as boerewors, including a minimum meat content and a cap on other ingredients, which is an unusual level of legislative attention for a sausage and a fair measure of how seriously the country takes it. That regulation is also why boerewors is genuinely hard to buy outside South Africa and why South Africans abroad end up making their own. The sausage belongs to the braai above all, grilled in its coil over coals. This stew is what happens to it indoors: cut into pieces, browned, and simmered with tomato, garlic and spices into something closer to a weeknight dish. Boerewors is also eaten with pap and a tomato and onion sauce, which is the standard plate across the country. The stew is a newer treatment of an old sausage, and its spread beyond South Africa has come with the diaspora.

South Africa30 minNympha

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

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

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

Tomato Bredie

Tomato bredie, called tamatiebredie in Afrikaans, is the best known of the South African bredies and the one most people mean when they use the word without qualification. It is lamb or mutton stewed slowly with a large quantity of tomato until the tomato collapses entirely into a thick, rich, deep red gravy. Bredie is an old Cape word for a dish of meat and vegetables stewed together until the flavours merge, and the form is defined by its restraint with liquid. Very little stock goes in. The gravy comes from the tomatoes and from meat carrying a fair amount of bone and fat, dredged in flour and browned hard before anything else joins it. That flour and that browning are what produce the body. Bredies are named for the vegetable rather than the meat, which makes tomato bredie one of a family that includes waterblommetjiebredie made with Cape wetland flowers, green bean bredie and cabbage bredie. Like most of them it is better the day after it is made, and South African cooks routinely make it ahead for exactly that reason. If you are refrigerating it overnight, the potatoes are best left out and added when reheating.

South Africa2 hrFoodChef

A homemade cream liqueur made with coffee, whiskey, condensed milk and cream, in a bottle

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.

South Africa1 hr 30 minJennifer

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

Peppermint Crisp Tart

Peppermint crisp tart is a South African fridge tart, which is a category of dessert the country has more or less to itself: no baking, assembled in layers, and set in the refrigerator rather than an oven. This one takes about fifteen minutes to build and then several hours of waiting, which is the hardest part. It is built from four things, three of which are specific products. Whipped cream is folded together with caramelised condensed milk, grated Peppermint Crisp chocolate is stirred through, and the mixture is layered between Tennis biscuits, a coconut biscuit that softens into an almost cake-like layer as it sits. The biscuits are what make it a tart rather than a mousse. That dependence on particular brands makes it awkward to reproduce outside southern Africa, and South Africans abroad tend to have it carried out to them. The usual substitutions are a peppermint Aero bar for the Peppermint Crisp and a plain coconut biscuit for the Tennis. It appears at braais, birthdays and family gatherings, and it belongs firmly to the same national repertoire as malva pudding and koeksisters.

South Africa15 minAmara

Peri Peri Sausage Rolls

This is a British sausage roll carrying a Southern African sauce, and it is worth being precise about which part comes from where. The sausage roll itself, seasoned pork in puff pastry, is British. Peri peri is the contribution from Africa, and it is a substantial one. Peri peri, also spelled piri piri, is the Swahili name for the African bird's eye chilli, a small and ferociously hot capsicum that grows wild across Mozambique, Angola and southern Africa. Portuguese traders encountered it in their African territories and built a sauce around it with garlic, lemon, vinegar and paprika, and that sauce travelled back through Portugal and outward again. Its association with grilled chicken in Mozambique and South Africa is where most people meet it. So this is a fusion piece rather than a traditional dish of anywhere, and it makes no claim otherwise. It is also a genuinely demanding recipe: the pastry is laminated from scratch, which means rolling and folding butter into dough across several chilled stages, and that is the bulk of the work. Shop bought puff pastry produces a perfectly good sausage roll and removes about ninety minutes.

South Africa1 hr 45 minChef.donkey

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

Split Pea Soup

Split pea soup is South African winter food, and it belongs to the same domestic tradition as sugar bean soup and other legume stews made to get a household through cold months cheaply. Split peas are ordinary peas dried and split along their natural seam, which lets them break down into a thick purée rather than staying whole. It is usually built on a meat base. Beef bones are the most common choice for the depth they give, though this version uses chicken drumsticks simmered first so their flavour goes into the water the peas then cook in. A meat free version is entirely possible and is made, but most South African households treat the meaty stock as the point of it. What it is served with is not negotiable in the households that make it: bread spread generously with margarine, or hot pap. It is the kind of dish that attaches itself to particular people and particular kitchens, and the contributor who submitted it describes it as their late grandmother's winter standby, made when the grandchildren visited during school holidays. That is how most South Africans encounter it.

South Africa55 minTshego Stone

South African Picnic Bread sliced to reveal cheese, bacon, and spring onion filling, a popular braai bread from South Africa

Picnic Bread (From South Africa)

Picnic bread is a South African savoury quick bread, heavy with cheese, spring onion and bacon, bound with egg, and made to be eaten cold in a slice with nothing on it. The category matters. It is a quick bread, raised chemically rather than with yeast, which means no proving and no kneading. Everything is mixed and baked. That is much of why it exists: it is a bread that can be made in an evening for the next day without planning. Its association is with food carried away from home. It is described as an old recipe favoured by fishermen for their packed lunches and by schoolchildren, and the reasoning is visible in the recipe itself. It needs no butter because there is enough fat in it already. It holds together in a slice rather than crumbling. It does not dry out the way a plain loaf does. And it is dense enough that one slice is a meal rather than an accompaniment, which is exactly what you want on a boat or a long day out. The texture is unusual for a bread. It is moist, almost pudding-like in the middle, without being heavy, and the cheese keeps it soft for days. It is honest about what it is: nobody has ever pretended this is a low-fat recipe.

South Africa55 minFoodChef

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

Mealie Pap

Mealie pap is South African maize porridge, made from milled white maize cooked slowly with water into a smooth, thick porridge. It is eaten by everyone and at every age, and it is one of the first solid foods many South African children are given. Sweet or savoury are both standard. With sugar and milk, or golden syrup and butter, it is breakfast. With chopped spring onion and sliced hard egg it becomes something closer to congee. Stiffer versions are eaten with meat and relish as the main starch of a meal, which is where pap en vleis comes from. It has close relatives across the continent, made from the same maize by the same method: ugali in Kenya and Tanzania, sadza in Zimbabwe, nsima in Malawi. Maize itself is not indigenous to Africa. It was brought from South America by the Portuguese and became the dominant staple across much of the continent within a few centuries. Mealie meal comes coarse or fine depending on use, and it is not as fine as cornflour, which is a different product and will not make pap.

South Africa1 hrNympha

Peri Peri Chicken Sauce

Peri peri, also written piri piri, is a sauce built on the African bird's eye chilli, and both the chilli and the sauce belong to the Portuguese-speaking parts of southern Africa. Piri piri is Swahili for pepper, and the chilli itself grows wild across Mozambique, Angola and the surrounding region. Its history runs both ways across the Atlantic. Chillies are South American and were carried to Africa by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, where the small bird's eye variety naturalised and became a defining ingredient of Mozambican cooking. Portuguese settlers then took the sauce back to Portugal, and from there it spread internationally, which is why most people outside Africa first meet it as a restaurant chain flavour rather than as a Mozambican one. The sauce is not only heat. Bird's eye chilli brings a genuine fierceness, but the finished sauce carries tangy citrus from lemon, a little sweetness from sugar, and an earthy smokiness from paprika and garlic, and the result is thick, almost paste-like. The technique worth noting is emulsifying the oil into the blended sauce at the end, at reduced speed, which gives the body it needs to cling to chicken. The source is emphatic on one point: do not use extra virgin olive oil, which turns bitter when blended.

Mozambique1 hr 10 minChef.donkey

Hertzoggies

A hertzoggie is a small tartlet: a short pastry base, a spoonful of apricot jam, and a coconut meringue topping baked until crisp and golden. It is called a hertzogkoekie in Afrikaans and a Hertzog cookie in English, and it has been made in South Africa since the 1920s. The name is political. The tartlet was created by supporters of J. B. M. Hertzog, the Boer War general who became South African Prime Minister, and it carries his name a century later. That is an unusually specific and unusually documented origin for a baked good, and it is worth recording plainly as history rather than endorsement. It is still widely eaten. Hertzoggies are a standard tea-time biscuit across South Africa and are made at home as part of the country's cottage baking tradition, alongside koeksisters and other well-known South African sweets. They are also strongly associated with Eid in the Cape Malay community, where they appear on the table among the other sweets prepared for the occasion. The combination of light pastry, sharp apricot jam and chewy coconut meringue is the whole appeal, and each of the three needs to stay distinct.

South Africa1 hr 5 minNympha

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

Rice Pudding

Rice pudding is rice cooked in milk with sugar, and it exists almost everywhere rice is grown. The source names no country and it would be wrong to give it one: recipes differ enormously not only between countries but within them, and the dish belongs to no single tradition. Africa has its own versions, which this is not. Roz bi laban is the Egyptian and Levantine rice pudding, set with cornflour and scented with rose or orange blossom water. Muhallabia is its relative. Thiakry in Senegal and the Gambia is millet couscous with fermented milk rather than rice. Each is a distinct dish with its own name and this generic version is none of them. What is here is a stovetop pudding built on cooked rice, milk, sugar, egg and raisins, thickened by tempering egg into the hot mixture, and finished with butter, vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. Tempering is the technique that matters: a cup of the hot rice is stirred into the beaten egg before the egg goes back into the pan, which raises its temperature gradually and stops it scrambling. It sits in Worldwide Recipes under Global, with its URL unchanged.

South Africa40 minNympha

Peanut Butter Cheesecake

A no-bake cheesecake with a digestive biscuit base, a cream cheese and mascarpone filling loosened with peanut butter, a layer of peanut butter fudge, and a chocolate ganache on top. No country is named and none applies: this is a modern dessert of the kind made everywhere. It sits in Worldwide Recipes for that reason. Nothing in it is regional. Digestive biscuits are British, mascarpone Italian, and the peanut butter and chocolate pairing is North American in origin. That combination is now international and belongs to no particular kitchen. Africa's own peanut desserts are quite different and worth naming, since peanuts are one of the continent's defining crops. Kuli kuli is the Nigerian fried peanut snack. Meni-meniyong is the Malian sesame and honey brittle. Nkate cake is Ghanaian peanut brittle. None of them resembles a cheesecake. Two practical notes: nothing here is baked, so the times are chilling times rather than cooking, and the source's ingredient list has section headings tangled into it, which has been reconstructed against the method. Contains peanuts.

South Africa1 hrChef.donkey

South African Peri Peri Chicken

Peri peri chicken is marinated in a paste of chilli, lemon, olive oil, garlic and spices, then seared and finished in the oven. It is flame-grilled in its classic form, and it is one of the most exported dishes southern Africa has produced. Its origins are genuinely contested. The source is direct that it is not clear who first made it, and that the question remains hotly debated between Portuguese-Angolans and Portuguese-Mozambicans. What is not in dispute is the chilli: Portuguese settlers brought chilli peppers to Angola and Mozambique, where the small African bird's eye variety naturalised, and piri piri is the Swahili word for pepper. Peri peri is central to Mozambique's history precisely because the sauce reflects the mixing of cultures there. This version is filed as South African, which reflects where the dish is now most commercially associated rather than where it began, and that distinction is worth keeping in view. The marinade needs overnight, or at least three hours. The technique is a hard sear in an ovenproof pan followed by fifteen to twenty minutes in the oven, with the reserved marinade poured in to become the sauce.

South Africa50 minAmara

Biltong

Biltong is air-dried cured meat from southern Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia, cut into thick strips, cured in vinegar and spice, and hung to dry for days. It is made from beef and from game including ostrich and kudu. It is not beef jerky, and the difference is real. Jerky is usually cut thin against the grain, marinated in a sweet or soy-based liquid and dried with heat. Biltong is cut thick along the grain, cured with vinegar, salt and coriander, and dried in moving air without heat at all. The flavour and texture that result are quite different, and coriander is the spice that identifies biltong. Two things need saying about method. The first is safety: **this is a raw cured meat that is never cooked.** The 24-hour vinegar and salt cure and the drying are what preserve it, and both need to be done properly. The second is airflow. The meat hangs in a ventilated space with a fan blowing gently, never directly, because a fan pointed at the meat causes case hardening, where the outside seals before the inside has dried. Drying time varies with humidity and temperature, so it is tested by feel: any give means it is still wet inside.

South Africa30 minNympha

Cape Malay Pickled Fish

Firm white fish, floured and fried, then layered under a sweet-sour curried onion sauce and left in the fridge for at least a day before it is eaten. It is Cape Malay, it is South African, and in Cape Town it is inseparable from Easter. The Cape Malay community descends from people brought to the Cape from Southeast Asia, largely from the Indonesian archipelago, as slaves and political exiles by the Dutch from the seventeenth century onwards. Their cooking is the origin of much of what is now considered characteristically Cape cuisine, and pickled fish belongs squarely to it, the turmeric, the coriander seed, the bay leaves and the sweet-sour balance are all markers of that lineage. The Easter association is real but the explanations for it vary, and the dish is not exclusively Christian: it is eaten in Muslim Cape Malay households too, which is one of the reasons the "made for Good Friday" account is contested. Its practical origin is simpler. Vinegar and sugar preserve cooked fish for weeks without refrigeration, which mattered a great deal in the early colonial Cape. It genuinely improves with time. A day in the fridge is the minimum; two or three is better, and it holds for several weeks. The source's nutritional claims have not been carried across.

South Africa50 minAmara

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.

South Africa20 minFoodChef

Chicken and potatoes cooked in a spiced South African sauce

Potatoes and Chicken Sauce

Chicken and potatoes cooked down together with onion, stock and warm spices into a single-pot sauce. It is South African home cooking of the plainest and most useful kind, and the seasoning is what identifies it. Knorrox stock cubes and peri-peri are both South African supermarket staples, and the combination, a stock cube, turmeric, garlic powder and a peri-peri kick, is a recognisable everyday shorthand in kitchens across the country. Nothing about it is ceremonial. It is a weeknight dish built around what is in the cupboard, filed by the source under breakfast, which is plausible enough in a household where a substantial early meal is normal. This page needs a warning that most do not. Its ingredient list omits the chicken and the potatoes, the two things the dish is named after, and also omits the stock, sage and basil that its method then tells you to use. It lists mayonnaise, which never appears again. The recipe below reconstructs the ingredient list from what the method actually requires, with quantities that are working estimates rather than anything the source provides. Brand names have been described generically, so the recipe works wherever it is cooked.

South Africa45 minLisias Johanna

Three-layer carrot cake with cream cheese frosting

Super Soft Carrot Cake

A three-layer carrot cake spiced with cinnamon and mixed spice, drizzled with orange juice while still warm, and filled with cream cheese frosting. The contributor is South African, and the cake is presented as a fixture of tea parties and meetings there. Carrot cake is European in origin, so it sits in Worldwide Recipes. Its ancestry runs back to medieval carrot puddings, made at a time when sweeteners were expensive and carrots were among the sweetest things available, which is the grain of truth behind the source's note that carrots were once used to sweeten confectionery. The modern iced cake is a twentieth-century development, and its firm adoption into South African home baking is real and worth recording, even though the dish is not African in origin. Two things about this version are its own. Treacle sugar, alongside brown sugar, is a distinctly South African ingredient and gives a deeper, more molasses-like flavour than brown sugar alone. And the orange juice poured over the layers as they come out of the oven is what the title's "super soft" refers to, the same principle as soaking a sponge in syrup, using juice instead. The source's ingredient list garbles the frosting quantities. The proportions here come from its written recipe, which is coherent.

South Africa2 hrTshego Stone

South African vetkoek, deep-fried bread rolls, split and served warm

Vetkoek (South African Fried Bread)

Vetkoek is a yeasted dough, flattened by hand and deep-fried until it is crisp outside and soft as bread inside. The Afrikaans name translates literally as fat cake, and the isiZulu and isiXhosa name is amagwinya. It is one of the most widely eaten things in South Africa. Its lineage is Dutch. Fried yeast dough came to the Cape with Dutch settlers, and vetkoek belongs to the same broad family as the Dutch oliebol, the Caribbean johnnycake and Mexican sopaipillas. What happened to it afterwards is what makes it South African: it became township food and street food, sold from stalls and windows across the country, and its usual filling, curried beef mince, is itself a product of the Cape's Indian and Cape Malay influence. It is eaten both ways round. Split and stuffed with curried mince, cheese, polony, tinned fish or slaw, it is lunch. Split and spread with syrup, honey or jam, it is a sweet snack with tea. Neither version is more authentic than the other. Note that this page covers plain vetkoek. The filled version with beef mince curry has a separate page on this site, and the two are meant to complement rather than replace each other.

South Africa45 minFoodChef

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