Recipes

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.

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55 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Tshego Stone · Africook

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.

45 minEasySouth Africa · African

Recipe by Lisias Johanna · Africook

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.

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55 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Laila · Africook

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.

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3 hr 30 minMediumSouth Africa

Recipe by Amara · Africook