Food

general info - "Rainbow" cuisine - wine history - short list of favourite food places - recipes - contact

South African food celebrates the country's rich cultural heritage, as well as taking advantage of the natural bounty of seafood, meat, game and plants. All this food has got to be washed down with something, and our wine has been earning rave reviews internationally for 300 years.

Special dietary requirements?
Most travellers with special diet requirements (e.g. gluten free, lactose intolerance etc.) can travel without any problems if the necessary care and preparation was made beforehand. LB Safaris have had lots of experience and will be able to advise you accordingly. Please do not hesitate to contact us should or ask a free cost estimate for a tailor made travel package not forgetting to fill in your dietary requirements clearly.

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A cultural melting pot
South Africa is triply blessed. A long and varied coastline supplies us with an astonishing amount and variety of seafood; our fertile soils and wonderful climate work together to produce an enormous range of agricultural products; and our chequered history has endowed us with a population with such diverse cultural backgrounds that fusion is hardly anything new here.
Of course, you will find a whole range of restaurants serving anything from hamburgers to sushi, but let's concentrate on our specialities.
Our seafood is legendary, and is best sampled at one of the West Coast's open air restaurants - not much more than simple shelters on the beach. As well as mussels, fish stew, grilled fish and lobster, you may be offered pickled fish - a well-loved dish which you'll also find in some traditional Cape Malay restaurants.

Other Malay specialities include fruity, spicy but not overpowering curries, smoorsnoek (a fish dish not unlike kedgeree), koeksusters (a sweet, syrupy treat), bobotie (a spicy mince dish), and some Indian specialities, such as rotis and samosas, with a local twist.
But our cuisine truly is multicultural, and nowhere is this more apparent than at a typical South African braai (barbecue). Now braais are assumed to be the domain of the Afrikaner male, but the reality is not nearly so simple.
Yes, there is an awesome amount of meat, most notably the very Afrikaner boerewors (a spicy, fatty sausage), but there will almost certainly be sosaties too. This is a lightly curried meat kebab, not unlike an Indonesian satay, which was brought to this country by the Malays hundreds of years ago.

And of course, no braai is complete without pap en sous, which is the staple diet of most of Africa. It's a grits-like maize porridge, cooked up stiff, and served with a relish of vegetables, usually tomato and onion at a braai, or wild spinach (merogo or imifino) in a traditional African environment. You'll get the opportunity to try this at most cultural villages, or at one of the many African restaurants which are scattered all over the country.

And, of course, all this food has got to be washed down with something. South Africans are great beer drinkers, and no braai is complete without the brown liquid. More worth trying, though, is the thick, low-alcohol, nutritious traditional African beer, brewed from maize or sorghum. But nothing can beat a good wine from the Cape - a notable wine-growing region for over 300 years.

Wine from the "Dark Continent"? To many European and American wine drinkers, this is a strange concept. In fact, there are vineyards all over Africa. Algeria and Morocco have been producing wines for decades, and modern wine-making has been set up in places like Zimbabwe and Kenya. But it is down south in the Cape, where climactic and topographic conditions simulate those of the old wine countries, that the continent's finest wines are produced. Today, the best of South African wine is up there with the rest, while in the "easy-drinking" category no one beats us! History has a way with wine, and the Cape's wine culture, which goes back 350 years, is one that both reflects the country's troubled colonial and apartheid past - but also shines with the potential and expectation of the modern wine world.

From that long history comes a wine tradition of tastes and styles with its roots in the classic "Old World" of France, Germany and Italy, but also an acute awareness of the contemporary consumer, as has been defined by wine-making in the "New World" of California and Australia.
It has often been said that South African wine is in the unique position of straddling both these wonderful worlds. It offers marketing possibilities that can be harnessed for the challenges of the new global economy. It can offer the wine-drinking world all kinds of new flavour experiences. It can also show the way to handle such sensitive issues as labour relations in the reality of the beautiful Cape winelands.

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'Rainbow' cuisine
It was the search for food that shaped modern South Africa: spices drew the Dutch East India Company to Java in the mid-1600s, and the need for a half-way refreshment stop for its ships rounding the Cape impelled the Company to plant a farm at the tip of Africa. There are sections of Commander Jan van Riebeeck's wild almond hedge still standing in the Kirstenbosch Gardens in Cape Town. That farm changed the region forever. The Company discovered it was easier to bring in thousands of hapless slaves from Java to work in the fields than to keep trying to entrap the local people, mostly Khoi and San, who seemed singularly unimpressed with the Dutch and their ways. The Malay slaves brought their cuisine, perhaps the best-known of all South African cooking styles.

The French Huguenots arrived soon after the Dutch, and changed the landscape in wonderful ways with the vines they imported. They soon discovered a need for men and women to work in their vineyards, and turned to the Malay slaves (and the few Khoi and San they could lure into employment). Much later, sugar farmers brought indentured labourers from India to cut the cane. The British, looking for gold and empire, also brought their customs and cuisine, as did German immigrants.

And black communities carried on eating their traditional, healthy diet: game, root vegetables and wild greens, berries, millet, sorghum and maize, and protein-rich insects like locusts. Today the resultant kaleidoscope - the famous "rainbow" - applies not only to the people but to the food, for one finds in South Africa the most extraordinary range of cuisines.

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Wine for the modern market
In the post-apartheid era, since 1994, South African wine has returned to the world arena with significant impact, growing from some 50-million litres exported that year to topping 139-million in 2000, representing more than 25% of good wine production. It is still increasing, and Cape wine is reaching even more consumers in more countries. According to the latest figures from exporter association Wines of South Africa (Wosa), international sales for 2001 increased 17.8% compared with 2000, despite the global recession. Internationally, the industry is small, ranking 16th with about 1.5% of global plantings, but production, at seventh position, accounts for 3% of the world's wine.

As in most established wine-producing countries, new plantings are taking place at a pace and new varieties of wine grapes as well as new regions are being explored as the country finds itself at the frontline of modern market requirements. Of the 105 566 hectares under wine grapevines (compared with 98 203 hectares in 1997), according to the latest official statistics, 21.38% is chenin blanc - by far still the country's most widely planted variety. Sultana (11.28%), a grape that is also used for non-alcohol purposes, is next, followed by colombard and chardonnay.

South African wine: past and present
The very first vineyard planted in South Africa coincided with the arrival in southern Africa of the settlers from Europe.
In 1655, three years after his arrival in Table Bay, commander Jan van Riebeeck of the Dutch East India Company planted the first vines. In 1659 he wrote his famous report: "Today, praise the Lord, wine was pressed from Cape grapes for the first time."

After Van Riebeeck, it was governor Simon van der Stel who firmly established the wine industry in the Cape. He built the model farm Constantia and founded the town of Stellenbosch. Both are still considered focal points of quality winemaking. During the 18th century, Constantia's famous dessert wines established the Cape as a premium wine producer and its reputation was romantically global.

Meanwhile, Stellenbosch grew as a hub of viticultural endeavours, including being home to experiments that led, in 1925, to cinsaut and pinot noir grapes being grafted together into pinotage, a "local" variety well suited to indigenous conditions. By the end of the 19th century, South African vineyards and production were in decline. As in Europe, phylloxera had taken its toll. To control production and the market, a large farmers' co-operative, the KWV, was established in 1918. In 1925, Stellenbosch Farmers' Winery was founded. This merged with another large producer, Distillers Corporation, in 2001, and Distell is today, size-wise, a competitive player on the international stage.

After apartheid
During the apartheid years, South Africa's wine industry was turned inward and international trade diminished as sanctions took hold.
With the advent of democracy in 1994, the wine industry, which had been largely in the hands of white owners and producers, was forced to adapt. The KWV was dismantled into a commercially driven venture in 1997 and, together with other players, formed the South African Wine Industry Trust in 1999 to promote transformation of the wine industry.

Most owners are still white, but recent years have seen black partnerships and others coming into the industry. In 2001 a hands-on project, the Vineyard Academy, was launched to provide vineyard workers with skills training in various fields. Although consumption of wine in South Africa has not increased for some years, there are now positive signs that some of the bigger brand producers are looking at the potential of the urban black market.