South African Recipes

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.

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2 hr 15 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Debby · Africook

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.

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50 minEasySouth Africa

Recipe by Jennifer · Africook

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.

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2 hrEasySouth Africa

Recipe by FoodChef · Africook

Butternut Soup

Butternut soup is butternut squash cooked down and blended smooth, thick, sweet, deep orange, and eaten across a wide stretch of Africa as well as far beyond it. Its African presence is genuine and spread out. It appears in North African cooking and in southern Africa, particularly in Mozambique and Namibia, and it is a fixture of South African winter cooking. That distribution reflects the crop rather than a single tradition: butternut grows well across a range of African climates and is cheap and widely available. What varies is the seasoning, and it splits roughly along regional lines. Northern versions lean towards cumin, coriander and warm spice. Southern African versions more often use curry powder, ginger and a little sugar, and finish with cream. Chilli appears in both. The squash does most of the work. Roasting rather than boiling it concentrates the sugars and deepens the flavour considerably, at the cost of extra time. **Country left blank deliberately**, the dish is documented across several African cuisines and attributing it to one would be a guess.

EasySouth Africa

Recipe by Nympha · Africook