Recettes South Africa

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

31 hrEasySouth Africa

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

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.

3 days 1 hrHardSouth Africa

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 30 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

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

Recette de Nympha · Africook