Matters of taste: South African cuisine

There’s more to South African cuisine than biltong (which is surprisingly more-ish), including the world’s first fusion dishes
May 20, 2010

South Africa, it’s fair to say, is not reputed to have one of the world’s more refined cuisines. The country’s most famous food is probably biltong, the dried spiced meat—usually made of either beef or antelope and flavoured with coriander—that in Afrikaans culture is the customary accompaniment to an afternoon spent watching rugby. I’ve tried it a few times without finding it particularly tasty. And the experience triggered the thought: if this is South Africa’s most celebrated delicacy, what is the rest of its cuisine like? Recently I got the chance to find out as part of a group of journalists on a one-week tour of the country, courtesy of the South African tourist board. (Such freebies are being generously handed out in the run-up to the World Cup.) We started out in Durban, then went on a road trip through the remote and incredibly beautiful Cederberg mountains to the north of Cape Town. We ended up in the picturesque town of Franschhoek, where a literary festival was taking place. Central to the South African approach to eating, I discovered, are two precepts: always eat as much as possible; and do so at every opportunity. And the food itself is a lot more interesting than is often assumed. This is largely a result of the country’s rich ethnic mix. The Dutch colonists who founded Cape Town in the 17th century were soon joined by contingents of Huguenots fleeing religious persecution. The Huguenots spread out across the Cape, settling in particular in the area around what is now the wine-growing region of Stellenbosch. (Franschhoek, as its name suggests, was the focus of this French influx.) At the same time, the Dutch shipped in slaves from far-flung corners of its empire, in particular Indonesia and Madagascar, as well as other parts of Africa. This mix of Dutch, French, African and Asian (later added to by the Portuguese following the collapse of their power in other parts of Africa) resulted in the style of cooking known as Cape Malay, which is often described as the world’s first fusion cuisine. The most famous of all Cape Malay dishes is bobotie, a sweet and spicy mince pie topped with egg; others include piri-piri prawns and frikkadels, meatballs flavoured with nutmeg. The British arrived on the scene in the late 18th century. Their impact on South African cooking seems to be negligible (no surprise there), but their seizure of power did have one important effect. After they abolished slavery, many dissatisfied, mainly Dutch, settlers ventured into the interior; these Trekboere, as they were known, were the original Afrikaans nationalists. The nomadic lifestyle they adopted required new methods of food preservation, and biltong—the perfect food for a hike across the desert—was the result. It’s easy to see why biltong has such emotional resonance for white South Africans, and why it’s paired with that other cornerstone of Afrikaans identity, rugby. During our tour, I became rather fond of biltong, which I chewed obsessively in the back of our bus as we passed through the Cederbergs. Eating it in such a setting made sense. Other foods we encountered proved harder to love. At one farm, we were served chicken cheesecake, a dish that, though less unpleasant than it sounds, was far from being a culinary triumph. (Nor was it aided by the sickly sweet jams that accompanied it: South Africans are unaccountably fond of pairing preserves with savoury dishes.) The pungent wind-dried mullets we ate at a fish restaurant on the west coast didn’t go down well with my fellow tour members, although I found this piscatorial version of biltong—known as bokkoms—strangely appealing. Matters improved at another rustic restaurant, where we were served delicious Karoo-reared lamb chops and a superb passion-fruit ice cream made from condensed milk and canned cream. Franschhoek, however, proved to be the pinnacle of the trip. The town is regarded as South Africa’s culinary capital, and is home to several famous restaurants, including Le Quartier Français, recently voted the 31st best restaurant in the world. I was determined to eat there, though it wasn’t on our itinerary, so I turned up one afternoon and pleaded with the owner, Susan Huxter. Although it was fully booked, she invited me to come that evening and join a group of her relatives, including her elderly mother. Our party was served an eight-course menu, each dish paired with a different wine. Some of the dishes featured distinctively South African ingredients (such as a risotto flavoured with buchu, an indigenous herb used widely in medicine). But for the most part this was food unconnected to the country’s dominant culinary traditions; highlights included a foie gras and bacon jelly terrine served with whisky-soaked cranberries, and a sorbet made from raw jersey milk and fennel. It was odd, a few days after eating chicken cheesecake, to encounter such refinement: a little bit of Paris in Africa.