South African Cuisine - a meal you'll never forget.

WRITTEN BY : SHARANYA RAMESH
ROLL NUMBER - 3760

South African cuisine is very often called the rainbow cuisine, taken, obviously from the nickname of the country – the rainbow nation. The cuisine is distinguished from other cuisines with its distinctive use of flavouring.
The food of South Africa can be characterized into two types – food by the Xhosa and Zulu tribes and then the food by the immigrants of South Africa. This blog will be focusing on the pre-colonial period tastes of the South Africans. This is because, it is very interesting to note how these distinctive flavours that now make South Africa’s cuisine so popular, came into being.
In the pre-colonial period, indigenous cuisine was characterized by the use of a very wide range of foods including fruits, nuts, bulbs, leaves and other products gathered from wild plants and by the hunting of wild game. The introduction of domestic cattle and grain crops by Bantu speakers who arrived in the region about two thousand years ago and the spread of cattle keeping to Khosian groups enabled products and the availability of fresh meat on demand. The pre-colonial diet consisted primarily of cooked grains, especially sorghum, fermented milk (somewhat like yogurt) and roasted or stewed meat. In many ways, the daily food of Black South African families can be traced to the indigenous foods that their ancestors ate. A typical meal in a Black South African family household that is Bantu-speaking is a stiff, fluffy porridge of maize meal (called "pap," and very similar to American grits) with a flavorful stewed meat gravy.
For many Black South Africans, the center of any meal is the meat. The Khoisan ate roasted meat, and they also dried meat for later use. The influence of their diet is reflected in the universal (black and white) Southern African love of barbecue (generally called in South Africa by its Afrikaans name, a "braai") and biltong (dried preserved meat). As in the past, when men kept cattle as their prized possession in the rural areas, Black South Africans have a preference for beef. Today, Black South Africans enjoy not only beef, but mutton, goat, chicken and other meats as a centerpiece of a meal. On weekends, many Black South African families, like white South Africans, have a "braai," and the meal usually consists of "pap and vleis," which is maize porridge and grilled meat. Eating meat even has a ritual significance in both traditional and modern Black South African culture. For weddings, initiations, the arrival of family members after a long trip and other special occasions, families will buy a live animal and slaughter it at home, and then prepare a large meal for the community or neighborhood. Participants often say that spilling the blood of the animal on the ground pleases deceased ancestors who invisibly gather around the carcass. On holiday weekends, entrepreneurs will set up pens of live animals along the main roads of Black townships -- mostly sheep and goats -- for families to purchase, slaughter, cook and eat. Beef being the most prized meat, for weddings, affluent Black families often purchase a live steer for slaughter at home. Vegetarianism is generally met with puzzlement among Black South Africans, although most meals are served with vegetables such as pumpkin, beans and cabbage.
After high levels of immigration and the mixing of various flavours, many of these South African traditions have now changed. What hasn’t changed however is the taste of a good South African meal. Great, tasty and wholesome! With that, I think it’s time I got myself something to eat.