Food Review: Bobotie

I would just like to take you all away for a moment. Away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and all of the dire news reports to the one thing at the centre of every person’s heart: food. Everyone has a favourite food – a certain meal that they would eat at any time of day in any situation. And the favourite food of your humble correspondent just so happens to be Bobotie.

Bobotie in itself is an interesting food – certainly enough to turn someone’s head on hearing another person speaking about it. It is a South African delicacy of Indonesian origin: minced meat (usually lamb) topped with an egg mixture and baked. It sounds unusual, and it most undoubtedly is. Such a country as South Africa is not usually associated with ingredients like curry powder and rice but in the Bo-Kaap, the distinctive brightly-coloured sector in the east of Cape Town, Bobotie and its cousins are widespread: the legacy of Dutch colonists who brought Indonesian culture to the Cape of Good Hope. The Bo-Kaap, as well as being the spiritual home of Bobotie, is also the location of South Africa’s oldest mosque and the main home of the Cape Malay ethnic group. Bobotie is thought to have been developed from the Indonesian dish Bobotok, which involved many similar ingredients, but most of the dish’s relatives are now found in South Africa alone, though Bobotie itself can be found in white settler communities as far away as Kenya and Argentina. In any event, it is delicious.

And that is a short and highly unorthodox cultural lesson centred around one rather anonymous South African dish. Who knows what other mysteries and teachings might arise from looking at other foods?