Nearly three weeks since my return from South Africa, I think I have finally digested the experience. In addition to two weeks of hiking, game drives, and wine tastings, I ate. And did I ever eat.
Honestly, aside from wild animals, I didn’t really know what to expect from South Africa particularly when it came to the cuisine. Sure the food of Cape Town has been featured recently in everything from the New York Times Travel section to Bon Appetite, but then again, so has just about every other major metropolitan city. If you look at the travel guides, the food of South Africa doesn’t sounds particularly exciting nor does it seem to have a cohesive identity. Its neighbor to the East, Mozambique, has developed a unique cuisine based around its heritage of Portuguese occupation mixed with local ingredients to produce a unique food culture. South Africa is more of a melting pot than Mozambique having been inhabited by the Dutch, English, French, Germans, Indians who were brought in as slaves and the native population.
Cape Malay cuisine is seemingly the one recognized cuisine that could be considered unique to South Africa. From the heritage of slaves brought from Asian countries such as India and Indonesia, various curries developed in the Western Cape though none of them are particularly strong and heat from chilies is pretty much non-existent.
So as is often the case when you lower your expectations, I was amazed at how delicious most of the food was everywhere I ate in the county. True, aside from a few dishes that repeatedly popped up such as bobotie, a baked casserole made with ground meat and topped with custard, there did not seem to be a unifying style of cooking. However, what made the food of South Africa excel above the level of mediocre was the quality of the ingredients.
In a way, South African cuisine could be compared to what in the United States we call California cuisine. California cuisine was pioneered by chefs such Alice Waters of Chez Panisse who did away with the heavy butter and reduction based sauces of the French and decided to make the ingredients the star of the plate. Creating a menu around farm fresh seasonal ingredients became the California standard that is now followed by chefs all over America.
In much of the country, South Africa has a climate not dissimilar to California making much of the land rich for agriculture. It was the beginning of winter during my South African visit and their tomatoes were sweeter than most California tomatoes are during August. Sweet potatoes were a revelation as unlike orange fleshed yams that most Americans think of as sweet potatoes, the South African sweet potatoes were a dull beige color but were, well, really sweet. And with the varied climates in the country, every fruit was locally grown from the apples which could rival those of Washington to the papayas which tasted as good as any I’ve ever had in Southeast Asia.
And then there was the meat. South Africans love their meat and with good reason, it is some of the best meat I have ever eaten. I joke that I ate five whole antelope during my time there and even if I only ate the volume equivalent of the tiny steenbok, I certainly did my best to east as many kinds of meat cooked in as many different ways as I possibly could. Springbok, a smallish antelope, is certainly one of the most abundant and most delicious. It has a texture similar to lamb but a taste more like venison. Unlike in the US where game must be farm raised for commercial consumption, a certain number of antelope must be killed every year in the wild to control populations and it is those very same springbok you drive past running wild and free that end up on restaurant plates. As that delicious animal has spent its life free from captivity, I found all the game to be lean and packed with flavor in every bite.
In addition to springbok, I ate blesbuck, kudu, ostrich, and warthog, just to name a few. I had springbok in carpaccio, blesbuck shanks braised in sauce, kudu loin grilled, and pretty much all of them in sausages or the ubiquitous jerky snack known as biltong.
When ingredients are so amazingly fresh, and a skilled chef knows how to handle them letting the food do the talking, it almost takes effort to make a bad dish. The worst meal I had was probably the Wimpy burger and Pringles I took down on the long drive to Kruger National Park, and even that, although bad for me, really wasn’t that bad. Even at Umlani, the humble bush camp we stayed at in Kruger, the chef turned out simple and honest dishes that were simply wonderful from pork chops to vegetables au gratin to homemade bread to one of the best crème brulée I’ve ever had.
For not having a unique cuisine, South Africa itself is certainly one-of-a-kind. The landscape is vast and varied, the people are a mix of tribes and cultures, and the food is distinctive in that it is so clearly an extension of that land and the hands that work it. From the smallest sweetest cherry tomato to the majestic horns of the rich and tender kudu, all it takes is a look out a car window to understand just what the cuisine of South Africa is all about.
