South African Recipes

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.

40 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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.

2 hrMediumSouth Africa

Recipe by Tshego Stone · Africook

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.

1 hr 5 minMediumSouth Africa

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

15 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Amara · Africook