Recipes

Dombolo, a South African steamed bread, cut into wedges and served with stew

Dombolo (Dumplings or Steamed Bread)

Dombolo is South African steamed bread, and it occupies a particular place in the country's kitchens because it is bread that never sees an oven. Where a loaf is baked in dry heat, dombolo rises under a lid over water, and the result is soft, dense and slightly damp in a way no baked bread achieves. It belongs to the stew. Dombolo is not eaten alone and is not a side thought about separately. It arrives with chicken stew, beef stew, oxtail, lamb or tripe, and its job is to take up the gravy that the meat has spent hours building. In Zulu households the same technique produces jeqe, and the distinction between the two names is one that South Africans hold firmly even when it is drawn differently from one family to the next: broadly, jeqe is steamed as its own loaf, while dombolo is the dough set to rise over the pot the stew is already in. It is Sunday food and gathering food, made in quantity, cut into wedges at the table, and eaten with the hands.

South Africa3 hr 30 minAmara

Potjiekos, a South African stew cooked in a three legged cast iron pot over an open fire

Potjiekos (Afrikaans Stew on the Fire)

Potjiekos takes its name from its vessel. A potjie is the round, three legged cast iron pot that sits directly in the embers, and potjiekos, pronounced poi-key-kos, is simply the food that comes out of it. The pot is a descendant of the Dutch oven brought to the Cape in the 17th century, and it is now found in households across southern Africa. The defining rule of a potjie is that it is not stirred. Ingredients are layered, meat at the bottom, vegetables above it in the order of how long they need, and the lid stays on. What comes out is not a stew in the ordinary sense: the layers hold something of their own identity rather than dissolving into a common sauce, and that separation is the point of the method. It is also a social form. A potjie runs for three to six hours, and the cooking is the occasion rather than the preparation for one. People sit around the fire while it happens. South Africans distinguish it from a braai, which is the other great outdoor cooking institution, and rank the two as the country's twin claims on the fire.

South AfricaAmara

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

Mogodu, a South African tripe dish, served hot with pap

Tripe (Mogodu)

Mogodu is the South African name for tripe, and it is among the most strongly felt dishes in the country's food. South Africans do not hold moderate opinions about mogodu. It has people who would eat it every day and people who will not have it in the house, and both positions are held with conviction. Tripe is the stomach lining of a ruminant, most often beef, and it belongs to the category of cuts that were once cheap because they were unwanted. That history is part of what the dish carries. Offal in South Africa was for a long time what was left over, and the communities it was left to made it into something with a claim on the national table rather than a mark of going without. It is winter food for many households, cooked slowly over hours until the chew softens without disappearing entirely. The texture is the reason for both the devotion and the refusal, and it is not something a cook can engineer away. Mogodu is eaten with pap, and the pairing is not negotiable: the neutral maize takes the place that bread would take elsewhere, against a dish whose flavour comes mostly from long contact with what it was cooked in.

South Africa3 hr 15 minAmara

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

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

Amasi, South African fermented milk, served thick in a calabash with a wooden spoon

Amasi Recipe

Amasi is fermented milk, thick and sharply sour, and it is one of the oldest things eaten in southern Africa. Unpasteurised cow's milk is left to ferment until it separates into a watery liquid called umlaza and the thick curd that is amasi itself, and the separation is the process rather than a fault in it. It carries names in most of the region's languages: amasi in isiZulu and isiXhosa, maas in Afrikaans, mafi in Sesotho, magege in Xitsonga. That spread of names across unrelated language families is a reliable indication of how long and how widely a food has been eaten. Amasi is associated particularly with Zulu and Xhosa households, where it was made in a calabash or a hide bag and served in a clay pot with wooden spoons. Its usual place is over pap. The sour milk against the neutral maize is a pairing that predates any of the dairy products it now sits beside on a supermarket shelf, and it remains an everyday South African food rather than a revived one. Commercial maas is sold nationally, which has changed how it is obtained without much changing what it is.

South Africa31 hrJennifer

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

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.

South Africa3 days 1 hrJennifer

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

Mebos

Mebos is one of the oldest sweets of the Cape: ripe apricots cured in brine, dried in the sun, and packed in layers of sugar until they carry salt and sweetness at the same time. The combination is unusual in European confectionery and entirely normal in the Cape, where the preserving traditions of several continents met and stayed. Its name records that meeting. Mebos is generally traced either to the Japanese umeboshi, the salted pickled plum, or to the Arabic mishmish, meaning apricot, and both routes point to the maritime trade that shaped Cape food. Either way the word arrived from outside and the thing itself became local. It is preserving food rather than confectionery in the modern sense. Apricots have a short season and mebos extends it by months, which is why the Cape's fruit growing districts produced it in quantity long before sugar was cheap. South Africans still carry it on hikes and long drives for exactly the reason it was made: it keeps, it needs no refrigeration, and a small piece goes a long way. The word is also applied loosely to other dried fruit sweets, which is a modern imprecision rather than the original meaning.

South AfricaNympha

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

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

Boerewors, a coiled South African beef sausage seasoned with coriander, grilling over coals

South African Sausage (Boerewors)

Boerewors is South Africa's sausage and one of the few foods in the world whose composition is set in law. Regulation requires at least 90 percent meat and caps the fat, which means anything sold under the name has to be the real thing. That is an unusual amount of legislative attention for a sausage and a reasonable measure of what it means to the country. It is coarsely minced beef, often with pork or lamb, seasoned with coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, bound with vinegar and filled into a natural casing in one continuous spiral. The coriander is the note people recognise. The spiral is not decorative: boerewors is grilled whole in its coil and cut only after cooking, because the casing holds the juices and cutting it first dries the sausage out. Its setting is the braai, and the braai is not a quick barbecue. It is an afternoon or an evening built around constructing a wood or charcoal fire and waiting for it to reach the right heat, during which a good deal of talking and drinking happens. When the braai master declares the fire ready, the meat takes half an hour and everything else has to be ready. For South Africans abroad, boerewors is the food most often named as the one they cannot get, which is why so many of them learn to make it.

South Africa2 hr 38 minFoodChef

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

South African chicken pie with a golden puff pastry lid, filled with chicken, ham and egg in a sago thickened sauce

Chicken Pie (Traditional South African Style)

South African chicken pie is distinguished from every other chicken pie in the world by one ingredient: sago. The pearls of tapioca are soaked and cooked into the sauce, where they turn translucent and give the filling a texture that is moist and slightly gelatinous without being wet. No other pie tradition does this, and South Africans who grew up with it can identify its absence immediately. The spicing is the other marker. Nutmeg and cloves in a savoury chicken filling reads as unusual to most palates and is entirely standard here, reflecting the Cape spice traditions that run through South African cooking. Lemon juice cuts it, and thyme and rosemary sit underneath. The source for this recipe is firm that the nutmeg and clove are non negotiable. It is festive food and family food. Chicken pie appears at Christmas, at Sunday lunches and at the potluck gatherings where South Africans bring a dish, and it is served hot rather than cold. Ham is scattered through the filling and slices of hard cooked egg are tucked in, which gives the cut pie its pink and yellow flecks against the white chicken. Yellow rice, roast potatoes, green beans and a tomato salad are the conventional accompaniments.

South AfricaFoodChef

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

South African pig trotters slow cooked in a tomato and onion gravy and served with pap

South African Pig Trotters (Maquina)

Pig trotters are the foot of the pig, and what they offer is skin, tendon and collagen rather than muscle. Cooked slowly they break down into something gelatinous and rich that thickens its own liquid, and in South Africa they are eaten both as a full meal with gravy and picked at with the fingers. The dish carries a name that shifts even within its own source: maquina in the title, manquina in the text. That kind of variation is common with foods that live in speech rather than in cookbooks, and trotters have lived in speech in South Africa for a long time. Like offal generally, they belong to the cuts that were left over, cheap because they were unwanted, and they were made into a proper dish by the communities they were left to. Trotters are eaten worldwide and the treatments vary enormously. Patitas de cerdo in Puerto Rico is a tomato and chickpea stew. Norwegian syltelabb is salted, cooked and eaten cold before Christmas. The South African version here is a simple braise: onions and tomato first, the trotters sealed into them, then two to three hours at very low heat until the skin yields completely. Pap is the standard partner.

South AfricaAmara

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

Sugar Bean Soup

Sugar bean soup is a thick South African winter stew, closer to a bean and beef braise than to anything most people would call a soup. Speckled sugar beans, the mottled pink and brown beans that are a staple of South African cooking, are cooked down with bone-in beef chuck and a great quantity of onion until the beans break and the meat falls off the bone. It is home cooking rather than restaurant food, and it belongs to cold months and to households cooking on a budget. Beans and a cheap cut of beef, cooked long enough, produce something substantial out of very little, and South African families have been making versions of it for generations. What marks this particular version out is that it uses convenience products as seasoning: a packet of dry oxtail soup mix, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and a beef bouillon cube, alongside red wine and tomato paste. That is characteristic of a certain era and style of South African home cooking rather than a mark against it, and the packet soup mix does real work, thickening the broth as well as seasoning it. It is served with bread, and the bread is not optional.

South Africa3 hrFoodChef

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

Droëwors

Droëwors is dried sausage, the air-cured relative of boerewors, and the name means dry sausage in Afrikaans. Thin sausages of beef or lamb with sheep tail fat are seasoned with coriander and spices and hung to dry until they are firm and dark, keeping without refrigeration. The technique belongs to the same tradition as biltong, and both come from the practical problem of preserving meat in a hot climate without cold storage. Dutch settlers brought curing and drying methods that met existing southern African practices of drying game, and coriander and vinegar became the signature of the local result. Thinness matters: droëwors is made in narrow casings precisely so it dries quickly and evenly, before spoilage can begin. Sheep tail fat is the traditional fat and it behaves differently from beef fat, staying stable rather than turning rancid through the drying period. The balance is delicate, since too little fat gives something unpleasantly dry and too much will not cure properly. Coriander is the constant seasoning, with cloves, nutmeg and black pepper in proportions that vary by household, and garlic or chilli appearing in some versions.

South Africa3 hrNympha

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

Biryani

Biryani is a layered rice dish of Persian and South Asian origin that has been part of South African cooking for well over a century, and the South African versions are now traditions in their own right. The name traces to Persian, birinj biriyan, fried rice, and the dish as it is recognised today developed among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent. It reached South Africa with indentured labourers brought to Natal from India from the 1860s, and separately through the Cape Malay community, whose roots lie in the people brought from the Indonesian archipelago and South Asia under Dutch colonial rule. What emerged is distinct. Durban biryani, the best known, is typically cooked with lentils and potatoes layered through the rice, and it is spiced with the chilli-forward masalas that also produced bunny chow. Cape Malay versions run sweeter, using cinnamon, cardamom and sometimes raisins, reflecting a different spice tradition entirely. The method is what makes it biryani rather than a spiced rice. Meat and rice are partly cooked separately, then layered and finished together under a sealed lid so the steam carries the spice up through the grains, dum, in the South Asian term. It is celebration food in South Africa as much as in South Asia: Eid, weddings, and large family gatherings.

South AfricaNympha

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