South African Food:
What Tastes Right is South African Delight!

If you want to visit South Africa, make sure you attend a braai, or a traditional barbeque, where you’ll surely taste some new flavors that will expand your palette.* South African cuisine specializes in bold spices, unique cooking techniques, and making the most of each region’s best produce. Every area and climate has a different diet, so for a super sampler of all the nation’s delicacies, you’d need to travel quite a bit!

Healthy diets include some kind of protein, but South Africans often opt for meats that may seem strange to American diners. For example, ostrich, crocodile sirloin, and fried caterpillars are some of the most popular dishes in the nation. Other unusual but popular meat staples include boerwors, or spicy sausages; skop, or the head of a cow, sheep, or goat; and frikkadels, or small hamburgers seasoned with nutmeg and wrapped in cabbage. Some South Africans dry their meat to make a jerky-like snack, called biltong. Also, many dine on a slowly cooked meat and vegetable stew called potjiekos. No worries if you don’t care for beef, though, because South Africans love seafood, too! The most common dishes from the sea include hake, rock lobster, mussels, cod, and octopus.

Potjiekos is a slowly cooked meat and vegetable stew that is a traditional South African dish.

South Africans make the most of their most prevalent crop: corn. It’s their most frequently used vegetable and the main ingredient in many regional recipes. For example, they roast it, eat it on the cob, or mash it into mielie pap, which is a type of porridge. You could eat corn at every meal! Of course, those kernels wouldn’t taste as tempting without the help of savory spices. South Africans favor curry powder, chiles (peri peri), coriander, cinnamon, cumin, and clove to make their dishes especially delicious.

The cuisine of the Cape Malay* community has become a food favorite for South African natives and travelers alike. Malays have a unique cooking style that mixes many spices and beef. Two Cape Malay dishes are bobotie, a minced meat cooked with brown sugar, apricots, and raisins; and koeksisters, sweet, spiced doughnuts that are dipped in syrup and rolled in coconut. A Malay cook, or a modji-cook, is usually a prominent woman in the community and caters for family gatherings. Because many Malay are Muslim, they recite the Bismallah* before every meal, and the host—often the cook’s husband—always helps himself first. This ritual represents just one of the many practiced by South Africans in which tradition meets cuisine.

*Palette: the complete range of flavors one is accustomed to
*Cape Malay: an ethnic group mostly found on the Western cape of South Africa, with origins from Indonesia. Dutch colonizers brought the early Malay people to South Africa as slaves.
*Bismallah: translates into “In the name of Allah.”

Sources:

www.elite.net, www.safarirangers.com, www.songstuff.com, geography.about.com, www.getaways.co.za, www.worldinfozone.com, www.music.org.za, www.geocities.com, www.peakperformances.co.za, www.leopardmannen.no, africanmusic.org, www.wikepedia.org, www.sharewareriver.com, www.joanngarbuttcreations.com, www.bpe.com, www.southafrica.info, worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com.

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