South African Recipes

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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

55 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Laila · Africook

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.

3 hr 15 minMediumSouth Africa

Recipe by Amara · Africook

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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

HardSouth Africa

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hr 40 minMediumSouth Africa

Recipe by Debby · Africook