A brief history of South African food

The Cape Town Foreshore

The new Cape Town Stadium where 2010 Fifa World Cup matches will be played

CAPE TOWN was built on spice and wine, and the city is as robust with flavour today as it was at its founding as a victualling station in the mid-17th century.

The city has been cosmopolitan since Dutch adventurer Jan van Riebeeck first sighted it in 1652 although it was 72 years earlier in July 1580 that the English admiral Sir Francis Drake had gazed upon Table Mountain and described it famously as “a most stately thing and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth”. Those two words, “fairest Cape”, are used to market the modern Cape Town still today.

Then, a world of adventurers and opportunists made the Cape a bustling sea port and tavern of the seas. Now, a world of cuisines can be found in its hundreds of excellent restaurants. Cape Town has become a world food capital, as visits to any number of the city’s hundreds of great restaurants will attest.

In the 17th century, the Dutch came here first, and as a settlement grew to feed and water the passing sailors of the Dutch East India Company during the flourishing 6000-mile spice trade from Europe to the exotic spice lands of the east, people from other nations began trickling in to live at the Cape of Good Hope. Not everyone came by choice, for there were slaves too, and the city’s culinary traditions owe their greatest debt to the influx of state prisoners from Java who started coming to the Cape in the early 18th century and were soon popular for their excellent skills in the kitchen. Many a Dutch household employed a Javanese chef and today’s ‘Cape Malay’ community is largely descended from these Javanese cooks.

But as time went by there were new Capetonians from Flanders, Germany and France, from Italy and Portugal, and Chinese who ran their coarse chop shops and lent an additional Oriental hue to the brew that became Cape Town’s wide-ranging spicy cuisine.

The classic view of Table Mountain seen from Milnerton beach

Peculiarly, the city is not packed, today, with restaurants on every street showing off the city’s own traditional cuisines, which were long dominated by Cape Malay and Dutch fare. With some happy exceptions, where you will find the best Cape Malay fare is in corner shops and hidden street cafes where you may find a lady in a headscarf cooking in the kitchen at the back. Find these places on foot, follow the aromas, and you’ll find the real thing. There is no street map to them. Watch out too for the spice shops – not commonplace, but hidden in pockets of the city.

The restaurant scene is quite another thing. In 20 years, the industry has exploded. Where there were mainly steakhouses, a few seafood specialists, a handful of Italian restaurants and the odd posh nosh palace, today Cape Town is a global food capital with restaurants specialising in Thai, Vietnamese and Japanese to others serving British, French, German, Austrian, American, South American, Middle-Eastern and, of couse, African fare. Leavening the brew is the influence of the fiery colonial cuisine of neighbouring Mozambique, a former Portugese colony, and of the large Portuguese community in the country, some of whom found their way south from Angola, Madeira or Portugal itself. Few in Britain know that Nando’s, the huge peri-peri chicken franchise you’ll find in almost every British town and village, is a South African concern. Peri-peri chicken or prawns are as South African as potjiekos and boerewors.

Potjiekos is an Afrikaans tradition of cooking al fresco in a heavy three-legged cast-iron pot with a tight-fitting lid. Meat or poultry is cooked for many hours with layers of vegetables over mild coals, with rice often included in the mix, moistened by stock and/or wine, and plenty of herbs and spices. Boerewors is the staple meat for braaing, deliciously spiced, and biltong is the famous dried beef, spiced with coriander seed. The braai (barbecue) is a national pastime. If the weather’s good, you’ll smell braai fires wherever you go, and you’re bound to be invited to a braai during your visit to South Africa. We even have indoor braais – an entire industry is built around these modern-day equivalents of the old-fashioned kitchen range. Accept the invitation. Just keep an eye on the guy wielding the tongs – some braaiers are better than others, and you do not want your lamb chops (tjoppies) to be dry and tough. They’re best cooked on very hot coals, turning frequently, so that the skin and fat are crisp and golden and the meat is pink at the centre. That’s when to whip them off. Boerewors, too, should be moist when taken off the coals.

Look out, too, for restaurants specialising in South Africa’s indigenous cuisine, which is hearty and very meaty, and includes local ingredients such as indigenous spinach and “pap”, which is similar to polenta and eaten with meat. There are local liqueurs too, such as Amarula Cream, made from the luscious marula berry. This is now exported to many markets.

There are other influences. South Africa has a sizeable and influential Jewish community, especially Johannesburg and Cape Town; there are many Greek South Africans, as there are Germans, particularly in the Mother City (Cape Town’s nickname). More recently – as recently as the new century – there has been an influx of immigrants from other African countries, including Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Malawi and further afield, whose cultures and cuisines are beginning to influence the already cosmopolitan and exotic brew. 

So it can be no surprise that there is a great deal of innovation going on in Cape restaurant kitchens.

In the 1990s, local chefs quickly climbed on the fusion bandwagon, some more successfully than others. This has all been distilled over the years and today there are many local restaurants serving highly imaginative fare that is not just a mishmash of anything that doesn’t really belong together on the plate (as happens with too much ‘fusion’). Some top chefs are now regularly including local ingredients, traditions and influences in their posh nosh menus, but we need more of this to give the region’s cuisine a thorough stamp that says ‘Cape cuisine’. This is something Sliver campaigns for and which I feel more chefs should strive for. We’re so close, but not quite there.

The city is, undoubtedly, the country’s food capital (although Johannesburgers will argue the point, and Durban is making great culinary strides). Restaurants in the city and nearby enclaves such as Franschhoek have in recent years found themselves in the top 100, and even top 50, in the world as selected by Restaurant magazine (UK). Two – La Colombe in Constantia and Le Quartier Francais in Franschhoek – made the top 50, way ahead of Gordon Ramsay’s London operations. Ramsay, too, now has a branch in Cape Town – right across the lobby from Nobu in the seriously swank One&Only Hotel in the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. By the way, that “Alfred” isn’t an error. It’s named not for her husband Albert but for Victoria’s son Alfred who visited the Cape in his younger years a century ago, just as young Harry occasionally pops into town these days.

The more pretentious of Cape Town restaurateurs do things like that. In Franschhoek, where there are only about three French-speaking people (locals mostly speak Afrikaans, recent emigres English), everything has a poncy French name.

Franschhoek has been flavour of the month for, well, some years now, having successfully and cleverly marketed itself as the gourmet capital of the country. All well and good, but greater Cape Town itself is really the true food capital of South Africa, and indeed of Africa. Welcome to Cape Town, and our well-flavoured, heady brew.