Iconic South African foods: taste all the flavours of the Rainbow Nation

SSome culinary specialities are quintessentially and uniquely South African – the foodstuffs South Africans miss when they are away from home, proudly serve to guests, and brag about when asked: ‘So, what do South Africans eat?’ 

These iconic South African foods have their origins in the indigenous, colonial, and immigrant societies that, over many centuries, have made this part of the world their home. 

Biltong, a kind of beef jerky, and beskuit, dried rusks, can be traced to the Afrikaans-speaking settlers who trekked away from the Cape Colony to found independent Boer republics during the 1830s and 1840s, and who needed food that was durable and portable. 

Malay cooks, who arrived in the Cape Colony as slaves from the mid-17th Century onwards, created one of South Africa’s most popular meat dishes in the form of bobotie (a spiced mince dish with raisins, topped with an egg custard and baked). 

Durban in KwaZulu-Natal is renowned for its curries, a legacy of the 1860s when indentured labourers from all over the Indian subcontinent were brought here to tend sugar cane. Many of their descendants are settled here, and the rich diversity of their ancestral homelands, encompassing Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and north and south Indian cuisines, gives the food in South Africa’s east-coast province immense variety. A visit to Durban without tasting a bunny chow (a half-loaf of bread hollowed out and filled with curry, with the soft hollowed-out bit used as a gravy mop) is almost unthinkable. 

Township cuisine features dishes like shisa nyama (charcoal-grilled meat), chakalaka (hot pickle), and mngqusho (crushed mielies and beans). Boerewors (a coiled sausage usually made of beef and pork and spiced with coriander, nutmeg or cloves) is also uniquely South African. Although originally Afrikaans in origin, it’s now popular across all cultures, with as many regional and cultural variations as there are braai fires on which to sizzle it. 

In fact, cooking over an open fire is something that unites all cultural groups in this country – another delicious local speciality enjoyed by all ethnicities is potjiekos, ‘pot food’. It’s a stew of layered meat and vegetables in a rich gravy, simmered in a cast-iron pot for hours over the coals, until it’s fall-off-the-bone tender. 

Other iconic South African foods retain a strong sense of place. Western Cape is the place to sample dishes like smoorsnoek (a kind of spicy kedgeree made from snoek, a line fish common in Cape waters) with moskonfyt (a sweet jam used as a ‘fire extinguisher’ to counter the spiciness of the snoek), or waterblommetjiebredie (a rich stew of lamb and the flower buds of an indigenous pondweed). 

As you travel around the country, be brave and sample this rich and varied offering of dishes that come out of the melting pot that is South Africa.