Bobotie met Geelrys (Bobotie with Yellow Rice)

We’ve chosen to prepare and share Bobotie with Geelrys, simply because we all enjoy it so much! It is a Cape Malay dish and has an interesting (sometimes contested) history. The Cape Malay community is descended from Malay, Javanese and Indian slaves, among other Asians, who were shipped to Cape Town in the 17th century by the Dutch East India Company.

These communities found themselves without access to their favourite ingredients such as coconut milk, a staple of Malay cooking, and tamarind, a popular flavour in south India. So they adapted their recipes and blended the spices they did have from ships plying the spice route, with European, mainly Dutch, cuisine.

Sweet and spicy bobotie, curried beef topped with egg custard, is a meeting of East and West. Bobotie is likely to have originated in what is now Jakarta, with the name being taken from an Indonesian dish called ‘bobotok’ - shredded coconut, bay leaves and other ingredients including vegetables and fish wrapped in banana leaves and steamed.

Bobotie came about as slaves from the region would eat roast meat on Sundays, and the following day, leftovers would be mixed with spices including bay leaves and sometimes fruits such as raisins. An egg mixture would then be poured over the top, and the dish would be baked and served with a sweet yellow rice and vegetables. The classic recipe today is made using beef mince, but venison, lamb or vegan mince make wonderful substitutes.

Bobotie: Serves 6-8 (half portion to serve 3-4)

Ingredients:

2 medium onions, peeled & very finely 4 tbs Mrs Balls’ chutney (or similar fruit chopped chutney) 2 tsp oil or butter 1/2 cup sultanas soaked in warm water for at 1 kg lean beef, lamb or Quorn mince least 45 minutes, then drained 1 – 3 tbs Neep & Okra Cape Malay Curry 2 thick slices sturdy white bread, crusts Powder trimmed 1 tbs sugar 1 cup milk 2 tsp salt 2 eggs 1/2 tsp ground white pepper pinch of turmeric, salt and pepper to season 1/2 tbs turmeric custard 2 tbs brown vinegar 4 fresh bay leaves

Bobotie Method:

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot and cook the finely chopped onion over medium heat for 5-7 minutes, until softened and translucent.

2. Add the meat and turn the heat up, stirring briskly to ‘crumble’ the meat and brown it without letting clumps form.

3. Add all the curry powder, sugar, salt, pepper, turmeric, vinegar and chutney, and stir through. Add sufficient water to reach the top of the mixture in the pot, and proceed to cook vigorously for at least 20-25 minutes, until the sauce has thickened, and the meat has a lovely loose, granular texture. Stir well.

4. Preheat the oven to 180 C and grease the inside of a large baking dish with softened butter. Set aside until needed. While the meat is cooking, break the bread into chunks using your fingertips, and place in a shallow dish. Pour over all the milk and let stand until the bread has absorbed as much of the milk as it can. Place a sieve over a bowl, tip the bread and the milk into it, and press against the soaked bread with a spoon to extract as much liquid as possible. Don’t discard the drained milk – you’re going to use that for the custard later.

6. Now is the time to stir the raisins into your cooked bobotie base until evenly spread throughout the mixture. Do the same with the soaked, drained bread, making sure it disperses completely into the meat – no white flecks allowed. The bobotie police will come for you.

7. Spoon the bobotie base into a large baking dish and smooth with the back of a large spoon.

8. Beat the eggs until completely smooth, whisk in the milk, adding the pinch of turmeric, salt, and pepper, and pour carefully over the bobotie base. Push the bay leaves upright into the bobotie and bake at 180 C until golden brown and nicely set on top, about 30 – 40 minutes. Remove and let stand for 15 minutes at least, before serving with yellow rice, salad and chutney.

Geelrys Direct translation from Afrikaans is ‘yellow’ (geel) and ‘rice’ (rys).

Ingredients:

1 cup basmati rice 200g 2 tsp oil ½ tbsp brown sugar 1 tsp turmeric 2 tbsp raisins or sultanas/golden raisins 2 cup water

Method:

1. Rinse the rice well under running water until the water runs clear.

2. Put the rinsed rice in a pot with the oil, sugar, turmeric and sultanas. Pour in the water, stir to mix everything together then cover the pot.

3. Place the pot over a medium-high heat to bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and allow to cook until all of the water has been absorbed, around 10 minutes. Stir to mix before serving.

.

Koeksisters (plaited doughnut dipped in syrup) Direct translation in Afrikaans (Dutch) is ‘koek’ meaning ‘cake’ and ‘sister’ meaning sister (sisters plaiting their dolls hair). The word ‘sister’ is suggested to also possibly be derived from the Dutch word ‘sissen’ meaning ‘sizzle’.

For dessert, we’ve chosen Koeksisters! They are a decadently sweet treat, often enjoyed with a strong cup of coffee but really good served cold with whipped cream and strawberries! Everyone who has ever lived in South Africa, knows what a koeksister is. That delicacy with a firm texture, soaked in the most delicious syrup, and braided like the prettiest maiden’s hair, is very hard to mistake for anything else.

The koeksister has quite an intricate past. Two recipes were brought to the Cape by Dutch settlers from the Netherlands in 1652. One was for a deep fried treat similar to a doughnut; the other for a thin, sweet bowtie-like invention made out of pasta dough.

Eventually, someone stared combining the two recipes by using the doughnut recipe, but instead of little balls, started braiding them. This sparked quite a craze. Everyone started baking them left, right and center. But now another problem arose: what to call it? It wasn’t uncommon for names like “mieliemeel dough-nuts” and “krullers kosieters” to pop up in cookbooks. This caused a lot of confusion, so in the 18th Century the name was officially changed to “koeksusters”. In the 20th Century the name was again changed to “koeksisters”, which is now the name they are known by.

This rich history, combined with their difficulty, make them something very special. They are a staple of most Afrikaner households. No Sunday afternoon is perfect without a steaming cup of coffee and a plate of syrupy koeksisters.

Ingredients: Dough: 2 cups cake or plain flour 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 50g cold unsalted butter, chopped ½ cup milk 1 egg

Spicy Syrup:

3 cups caster sugar 2 cups water 5cm piece ginger, sliced 1 cinnamon quill 1 vanilla bean, split 1 lemon, juiced

Method:

1.For the syrup, combine sugar, ginger, cinnamon and 2 cups (500ml) water in a pan over medium heat. Bring to a simmer, stirring until sugar dissolves, then cook for 3-4 minutes until fragrant. Transfer to a heatproof bowl with the lemon juice and chill for at least 3 hours.

2. For the dough, place flour, baking powder and butter in a bowl and rub the mixture together between your fingers until you’ve formed very fine crumbs. Add egg, milk and salt then stir to combing into a dough. Knead on a lightly floured surface for 5 minutes then enclose in oiled baking paper and rest in the fridge for 1 hour.

3. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until 7mm thick. Cut into 10cm x 5cm rectangles, then cut 3 lines lengthways into each rectangle, leaving a 1cm boarder at one end to hold the strips together. Plait the 3 strips and pinch end to seal.

4. Set bowl of syrup over a bowl of iced water (syrup must be very cold). Half fill a deep- fryer or large saucepan with oil and heat until 170°C. In batches, cook the doughnuts, turning, for 3 minutes or until dark golden.

5. Immediately soak in syrup for 1 minute, then drain on a wire rack. Drizzle over more syrup and store in an airtight container in the fridge. Side Note:

When Jess asked us if we’d like to lead a food chain workshop and we happily accepted, it brought up an interesting question for us: ‘What is South African culture and cuisine?’ South Africa has 11 official languages. A veritable melting pot of cultures include Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Venda, Swazi, Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga, Afrikaner, Cape Malay, Cape Coloured, Indian and English South Africans. Each of these nations has it’s own distinct language and cuisine, and sub-cultures within each are common. So varied are the cultures that Rev. Desmond Tutu coined the term ‘the Rainbow Nation’.

President Nelson Mandela famously said: "Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world"

In choosing our dishes for tonight’s workshop, we considered our family’s cultural heritage. My mum is English, born in London, and my grandfather was a wonderful cook! His famous ‘toad in the hole’ was one of my favourites. My dad’s mum, my Nana, was Scottish. And my absolute favourite sweet treat was (and still is) buttery shortbread. My husband’s two grandmothers were Italian and Afrikaans respectively. He remembers his Italian grandmother chopping basil pesto furiously by hand, and enjoying tasty pasta dishes many nights of the week. His mum (we call her ‘Ouma’) also made classic Afrikaans fare like Vetkoek, Koeksisters and hearty slow- cooked meat stews. I hear Ouma was an expert Koeksister-maker, but she doesn’t make them anymore as they’re very fiddly.

So, while I don’t have childhood memories of my mum making and baking these two dishes, we ended up choosing Bobotie and Koeksisters as they’re both just so quintessentially South African and both just so, so good!!