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FOOD & DRINK

FOOD

Southern Africa is a place of many cultures, and therefore, of many cuisines.

Scroll through all, or go directly to the topic that interests you. Once you have finished, you may click your way to the restaurant guide, or move on to Drinking!.

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Cape Dutch/Malay cuisine

The early Dutch imported slaves from Batavia, and Cape Dutch cuisine owes more to Indonesia than it does to Europe.

Bobotie is a spicy dish of minced mutton or beef (never pork, obviously). It is not sharp, as a curry would be. It is topped with a light coating of beaten egg before baking. Served on yellow rice with a few raisins added, and a dollop of chutney on the side. If you haven't tried it, you haven't really been here.

Pickled fish, usually hake, is cheap and popular, as are pilchards, which are caught in profusion in the cold Atlantic waters of the Cape. (For more about our seafood, read on, or click here.)

Snoek is a barracuda like fish with prominent sharp bones. It also has a strong taste, and most South African whites give it a miss. Personally, I think it's delicious, especially barbequed by an expert. The traditional way of doing it is smoorsnoek, where the deboned fish is slow cooked with potatoes and vegetables. Like bobotie, it is then served on yellow raisined rice with chutney.

Melktert (milk-tart) is a baked milk pudding. Not caramel, though the principal is the same. It is lightly dusted with cinnamon - very delicious and very fattening, but you can resume your diet once you get home.

Cape Brandy Tart is a baked fruit pudding, served plain, or with cream, ice cream, or both. Also wickedly delicious.

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Boerekos (the food of the Boers)

The wandering Boers were very self-sufficient, and ate what they hunted, or else ate what they farmed. They cooked on open fires, and the braaivleis, or barbeque, remains hugely popular, both as a way of eating, and of socialising.

Not having fridges, they favoured vegetables that could be stored. A traditional farmer's platter would feature any (or all) of the following:

Boerewors, or "farmer's sausage" - the best sausage in the world. It is made in endless form, instead of in links. You cut off as much as you require. It is made of real meat, and the addition of ground up bits of offal and other rubbish is forbidden by law. The meat may be beef, mutton or venison. Pork may be added. It is also quite liberally spiced, but never hot. Within these parameters, there are many recipes, with everyone claiming that his grandfather's recipe was better than anyone else's. These claims are frequently tested in serious boerewors-making contests.

Chops and steaks are just about the national food of white South Africans, who eat far too much red meat, and pay the price in heart attacks.

Potjiekos - "pot food" is, like boerewors, an art form. You take a three-legged traditional African pot, and fill it with layers of everything - meat, vegetables, plus your spices and other secret ingredients, which may or may not include a liberal dose of wine. Then you put it over a tiny fire and allow it to cook v-e-e-e-ry slowly for ages. The result is tender and delicious.

Bredie - not my personal favourite. Bredie's were a way of extending the available meat by cooking it with lots of vegetables. Bredies usually feature meat on the bone, and the fat is seldom removed, which is why I, as a lazy eater, don't like them. They are very tasty, but fiddly if you are fussy. Bredies are named after the predominating veg to which the meat is added - tomato bredie, spinach bredie, cabbage bredie, and so on. Most traditional of all is waterblommetjie bredie, which is made with a delicious pond lily that grows in the Western Cape. If bredies were made of lean meat, they would be fantastic.

Biltong is meat, beef, game or ostrich, which is soaked in brine and spices and then hung up to dry. Like boerewors, it is a national institution. It can be purchased in long sticks, which you chew on, or slice up yourself (watch dem fingers). It may be reasonably soft or rock hard. You can also buy it ready sliced. A variation is droewoers - dried boerewors. This is less hazardous to the teeth, but is not as good as the real thing..

Rice - very popular because it stored and tranported well. It may be served white, or yellow with raisins, Indonesian style.

Sweet potatoes - one of the indigenous vegetables of Africa. It is a great big tuber, which is cut into manageable sizes, before being baked or boiled. It tastes like - well, a sweet potato.

Gem Squash - a hard-skinned vegetable that stores and transports easily. It is cut in two and boiled. The flesh, when cooked, is soft and yellow, and very tasty with butter. Serious squash eaters eat the pips and even the skin, which is soft once cooked. I recommend you stick to eating just the flesh.

Pumpkins - this American favourite is boiled and mashed, often with a lot of sugar added - the Boers loved sweet things. Or it could be roasted on the coals, or in a pan alongside a joint of meat. In recent years, it has lost ground to butternut.

Butternut is a yellow-fleshed gourd vegetable vaguely similar to pumpkin, but more subtle and less sweet. Currently very popular, it is served boiled or possibly roasted in foil. Butternut soup is currently much in fashion.

Various kinds of melons are indigenous, and these were adopted from African cuisine, especially the spanspek, which the outside world knows as a canteloupe.

Koeksusters are the South African version of the doughnut. A syrupy concoction that comes in the form of two pieces twisted together. Very sweet, very delicious in moderation, served as a teatime treat. Ensure that you have your napkin handy. A properly made koeksuster may well squirt syrup when you bite into it.

Rusks - the Boers used to dip their stale bread in sugar water and then dry it out before the fire to make a long lasting biscuit that they could dunk in their coffee. Traditionalists serve them in the morning before breakfast.

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The food of Africa

The traditional foods of Africa have not made much of a hit on the western palate, although they can be judiciously manipulated to produce something interesting and enjoyable in small doses.

Phutu, or sadza, is the staple. Basically it is maize meal (we call it mielie meal), made into a very stiff porridge which can be made into a ball and dipped in gravy or relish. Mielie meal may also appear at breakfast in the form of a western style porridge.

Meat, when it was available, was most prized. The Africans tended to prefer the bits that westerners don't really favour (although oxtail is a hit with westerners and Africans alike). One of the popular staples is a whole sheeps head, which sits on your plate and stares at you in a grisly rigor mortis. This is known as a "smiley".

Indigenous vegetables included wild spinach, wild cabbage, and sweet potatoes. Ground nuts came along later, and they are prominent on the menu in African restaurants, but I suspect that they are really a West African thing, and not really a part of the African cuisine of this part of the continent.

Refer to restaurant guide for some suggestions on where you may go to try these, and other types of Southern African cuisine.

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Seafood

Hake is the most common fish in our waters. Often known as "stockfish", it is cheap and plentiful, and should you order "fish and chips" in a pub or a takeaway, hake is what you will get. It's really good, but most serious restaurateurs wouldn't dream of serving anything so common. If they do, they will call it merlu, in order to justify the high price that they will charge you.

The term line fish confuses many visitors. What it means is that the fish was caught on a line, not trawled in a net. However, there is also an implication that it was caught today, not last week, so it should be fresh, not frozen. Steenbras, Red Roman, Stumpnose, Kabeljou, are just some of the fish that come under the heading of line fish.

Cape Salmon is kabeljou, and why they have to invent another name for it is beyond me.

Kingklip is our "prince of fish". It is plentiful, and these days is usually caught on lines, so it can be regarded as a line fish. However, it is often frozen; don't be shy to ask.

Tuna, yellowtail and snoek are also line fish, but of a shoaling variety. When the fish are running, they fairly leap out of the water into the boat. Then they disappear for months. The tuna usually ends up in cans, and is seldom found as a menu offering. Yellowtail, a member of the tuna family, is very popular in restaurants. Very good, but some people give it a miss because the flesh, like tuna, is not as white as the other types, and it has a higher oil content.

Snoek are seldom found in restaurants because the type of people who patronise restaurants don't like the bones or the strong taste. In what I consider to be a silly form of snobbery, they regard this fine fish as rather downmarket.

Calamari is a squid like creature, usually served in the form of rings, which are deep fried and served with tartare sauce on a bed of rice. More interesting when done in the form of a stew, when there is more sauce and no batter. Calamari can also be found in the form of steaks, which require some skill in the cooking, but are delicious if the chef gets it right.

Crayfish (otherwise known as the clawless cape lobster) are one of our greatest delicacies. The flesh is in the tail (but don't forget to break the legs and claws and suck out the juicy bits there too). Much prized in other countries, the export demand is such that we have now made a law requiring that at least a portion of the catch be kept in South Africa and sold locally. (This does not stop the local price from matching the price that the Japanese would have been prepared to pay!) Steamed or grilled, thermidor, mayonnaise, or any other way, they are excellent. Crayfish are in season during the summer months only, so at any other time they will have been frozen, awaiting your arrival. Don't hesitate to ask.

Mussels are good, and as we are now farming them successfully, they are plentiful and not expensive.

Perlemoen (otherwise known as abalone) are another delicacy much in demand for the export market. If available, expect to pay, but they are delicious.

Oysters are also farmed commercially in these modern times, so they are regularly available.

If you are one of those adventurous types who don't mind getting your feet wet, you may catch all of these shell fish types yourself, provided that you purchase the appropriate permits, and stick to the laid down season and bag limits. However, you are warned that there are occasional bouts of a phenomenon known as red tide, when the sea becomes deoxygenated. When this happens, the shell fish are not safe eating, so make sure that you speak to the locals and listen to the news.

You can, of course, trust the shell fish served in restaurants. Don't purchase shell fish from informal venders. It's probably poached (as in, taken illegally), and may not be safe.

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Fast Foods

The world wide trend applies as much in Southern Africa as anywhere else. Workers in our towns and cities subsist on a diet of hamburgers, pies, toasted sandwiches and take-away chicken. Pizza steers a fine line between take-out and sit down. Nelson Mandela has retired as President of the people, but Coca Cola still wields more power than any politician ever did!

For highway fare, watch out for Wimpy, Whistle-stop and B J's. If you can make it to the next town of any size, you will find a branch of the Spur chain of steak and burger houses. This may sound American, but if you eat at the Spur, you'll be doing as the South Africans do. It's good, and it's value for money.

Spurs are really sit down steakhouses (and usually fully licenced as well), but they do a roaring take-away trade as well. Other chains that lean more to the take-away side of things are Steers, KFC and Nandos. Steers emphasises meat, but does chicken as well. KFC (being the new, non-fat, name of Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried) emphasises chicken, but does burgers as well. Nando's is the chicken specialist. Nando's does chicken like no one else does chicken. Nando's can do chicken such that people who don't like chicken will start liking chicken.

Competing against these well-established chains is a new kid on the block called Macdonalds. They are starting to appear in quite a few places, but I don't know if they realised that while they were boycotting South Africa for political reasons (so they tell us) we weren't starving.

Pizza and pasta are extremely popular, and there are any number of independents, but the big successful chain is St Elmo's. These are sit down places, but they do take-aways as well. Most of them are licenced to serve wine and beer.

Fast foods are often considered unhealthy. The Juicy Lucy chain specialises in fresh and healthy goodies - salads, wholewheat rolls, fresh juices, yoghurts, that kind of thing.

A recent South African success story is the emergence of the specialist pie outlets. Pie City and King Pie are two that spring to mind. Their pies are really good, far better, far fresher, (and appreciably cheaper) than those available from other take-away outlets. In fact, I would recommend that you do not purchase pies from any outlet other than a pie specialist.

The word "cafe" in South Africa seldom means a cute little bistro of the type found in France. A cafe is usually a convenience store that opens early and closes late. The Spar and Seven Eleven supermarkets are known as "cafes" in our South African-speak.

Many cafes will also offer fast foods of varying quality. Walk inside, take a look, and if the place looks too dodgy, buy a candy bar or a newspaper.

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Pubs

Pubs a la olde Englande are a relative newcomer on the South African scene. There are one or two with some genuine history - Foresters' Arms and the Perseverance Tavern in Cape Town are two of the most famous, but for many years a pub was a pretty downmarket place where you could have a drink and an argument, or a pretty upmarket place where you could have a drink, an argument, and a handful of peanuts. Food was out of the question, and you were expected to prop up the bar or crowd around a tiny table.

Three franchise companies have changed all that. With vague pretensions to being Irish or English, they are all actually indigenous South African creations, but they do a good job of providing drinks AND good food in respectable, comfortable and pleasant surroundings.

The Keg chain was (I think) the first. Their outlets are all called The Keg and Something - the franchise holder gets to decide what the something will be. The success of the Keg group was followed swiftly by the appearance of O'Hagan's Irish Pubs, and McGinty's Bar and Grill's.

Some of these pubs can get quite rowdy, depending on the area in which they are located, but by and large they can be recommended if you are wanting food and drink and a pleasant break. They have no pretensions to being high class restaurants, nor do they charge those kind of prices.

The Kegs, O'Hagan's and McGinty's can be especially recommended to inhabitants of the British Isles who are getting homesick for their kind of beer.

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General

Other things to watch out for in our otherwise western cuisine

Monkey gland sauce - has nothing whatsoever to do with monkeys, or their glands. Invented by a Johannesburg restaurateur many years ago, it is a piquant sauce of vinegar, tomatoes, onions and spices, usually served on steaks or burgers. It is very good, in its own way, but as it is not exactly subtle, it is more popular with the young than with the more refined palates of discerning diners.

Karroo lamb - lamb is lamb, but Karroo lamb is not just lamb. The Karroo is the vast semi-desert that occupies most of the Western Cape. There's very little one can do there except raise sheep. Unlike the tender lamb of New Zealand and other places, Karroo lamb cannot graze on sweet green grasses. It must subsist on the herbs of the scrub desert, and these give the meat a unique flavour. Don't miss it.

Ostrich - usually served in the form of steaks, although ostrich neck is becoming popular as an alternative to oxtail. Although it is a bird, the meat is red, like beef. It is fat free, which means no nasty cholesterol. Ostrich steaks are served at the ostrich farms, but are enjoyed to best advantage in good restaurants. The farm has a cook, but the restaurant has a chef.

Meat - South Africans are great meat eaters. Generally our meat is of good quality, and we have not had any nonsense with things like Mad Cow Disease. Steaks and roasts are very popular. Veal is not produced, so beware. The restaurateur may be using very young beef, but some cheat and serve pork schnitzels instead of veal. That's just not kosher, so if you don't eat pork, check beforehand. Venison makes its appearance after the culling season, and can be very delicious, but can also be very tough. It may sound very romantic to come to Southern Africa and dine on springbok or impala, but don't expect too much.

Cape seed loaf - it's more than just bread.

In Namibia, with its German heritage, expect to find some German type cuisine. Interesting and usually very good. The German heritage of wickedly delicious kuchen und other things is also found here.

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