Recettes

Creamy Prawns

Creamy prawns are a South African restaurant and home staple, and the country's long coastline and its Cape Malay and Portuguese-Mozambican influences are why seafood sits so comfortably in its cooking. Prawns are cooked briefly with onion and garlic, lifted out, and returned to a cream sauce reduced in the same pan. Chermoula is the ingredient that places it. It is a North African marinade, Moroccan and Algerian in origin, built on coriander, cumin, garlic, paprika and lemon, and its appearance in a South African prawn dish reflects how freely spice blends move around the continent. A seafood rub carries the rest. The contributor makes a comparison worth repeating: prawns are seen as a high-end, classy food, and they describe them as the mopane worms of the ocean. Mopane worms are the caterpillars harvested and eaten across southern Africa, nutritious, cheap and utterly unglamorous outside the region. Putting the two side by side is a fair point about how arbitrary food status is, and it is the kind of observation that belongs in the record rather than being tidied away.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

25 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Tshego Stone · Africook

Classic South African Kota

A kota is a quarter loaf of bread, hollowed out and packed with fried food. The word is township English for quarter, and that is the whole description: bread cut in four, the soft centre pulled out, and the cavity filled with chips, polony, russians, viennas, cheese, egg, atchar and sauce, then capped with the bread that was removed. It belongs to the townships of Gauteng, where it is sold from small takeaway windows and eaten in the hand without a plate. Kota shops compete on what they will fit into a quarter loaf, and the size of the fill is a large part of the reputation. It is cheap, it is a complete meal, and it is built for people who need to eat between one thing and the next. Atchar is what makes it South African rather than generically stuffed bread. The pickled green mango relish, oily and sour and hot, came to South Africa through Indian indenture and cuts the fried starch that dominates everything else in the cavity. Kota is often described as a version of bunny chow, and the two are related without being the same: bunny chow is Durban Indian, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, and kota is a Gauteng township form filled with fried items. They share an ancestor and are not interchangeable.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

40 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de Tshego Stone · Africook

Shrimp Fried Rice

Cold cooked rice fried with shrimp, peas, egg, garlic, ginger and soy sauce. No country is claimed, and the page sits in Worldwide Recipes. That classification needs explaining, because the source disagrees with it. It is filed under Southern African Recipes and asserts that "the method of preparation for this African shrimp fried rice is absolutely different from any other variety including that of the Chinese people." The ingredient list does not bear that out. Soy sauce, ginger, garlic, peas and scrambled egg folded through cold rice is a standard Chinese-style fried rice, there is no palm oil, no bouillon cube, no scotch bonnet, no fried rice spice, none of the markers that make Nigerian or Ghanaian fried rice genuinely distinct. Those dishes exist and are on this site; this is not one of them. What the source gets right is the technique, and it is the only thing that really matters in fried rice. Cold leftover rice has dried out at the surface and lost the moisture that makes fresh rice clump. Fresh rice, however good, fries up mushy. The other correct instruction is cooking the egg first and setting it aside. Scrambled into the rice it disappears; cooked separately and folded back in, it stays in distinct pieces.

35 minEasy

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook

Jollof Pasta

Pasta cooked into a spiced tomato and pepper stew in the same way jollof rice is made, with beef and shrimp. It is West African, and no single country is claimed. The idea is a straightforward transposition and it works. Jollof rice is rice cooked in a reduced, heavily seasoned tomato and pepper base until the grains absorb it; jollof pasta does the same with pasta, and jollof couscous and jollof spaghetti are made the same way. The key is the same in all of them: fry the stew properly and reduce it to a thick paste before the starch goes in. The source is emphatic about this and right, under-fried stew gives a watery, sharp result that no amount of later cooking corrects. The title needs a note. The page is called tagliatelle pasta and the article explains what tagliatelle is at some length, but the ingredient list specifies thin spaghetti. Neither is wrong for the dish, jollof pasta is made with whatever shape is to hand, but the mismatch is worth stating, and the title here names the dish rather than a pasta shape that may not be in your cupboard. Allspice, curry powder and chicken bouillon alongside chilli is the Nigerian seasoning signature. **It contains shrimp, which the title does not indicate.**

50 minEasy

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook