South Africa

Amarula is a South African cream liqueur made from the fermented and distilled fruit of the wild marula tree, blended with cream and served chilled.

A Southern African cured, air-dried meat — typically beef or game — seasoned with vinegar, toasted cracked coriander, salt, and pepper, then hung at ambient temperature until it reaches the desired dryness.

A Cape Malay-origin South African baked dish of spiced minced meat enriched with fruit and chutney, topped with a savoury egg-and-milk custard and crowned with bay leaves.

A coarse-ground, spiral-coiled South African fresh sausage made from a minimum 90% beef (often with pork or lamb) seasoned with toasted coriander seed, vinegar, and warm spices, and cooked exclusively over a live fire braai.

A South African open-fire cooking ritual in which meats — principally boerewors, lamb chops, and steak — are grilled directly over hardwood coals, functioning simultaneously as a cooking method and a communal, national social institution.

A Cape South African slow-braised stew of bone-in fatty lamb with a single dominant vegetable — most canonically ripe tomatoes — cooked until the vegetable dissolves into a thick, deeply reduced, Cape Malay-spiced sauce.

A hollowed-out quarter loaf of white bread filled with curry, the excavated bread plug balanced on top, eaten as a self-contained edible vessel originating in Durban's Indian community.

A spiced, cooked vegetable relish of onion, carrot, bell pepper, tomato, and tinned baked beans, seasoned with curry powder and chili, that serves as the defining accompaniment to South African braai and pap.

A Gatsby is a long submarine‑style bread roll loaded with seasoned masala chips, a protein such as chicken, fish or sausage, and typically dressed with chutney or peri‑peri sauce, served as a hearty street‑food snack.

Braided or twisted deep-fried dough plunged into cold sugar syrup, producing a crisp-shelled, syrup-soaked sweet.

A South African baked sponge pudding made with apricot jam and vinegar stirred into the batter, soaked immediately after baking in a generous hot cream-and-butter sauce that the pudding absorbs while still hot, producing a dense, sticky, caramel-like interior.

A South African dessert tart of a shallow pastry shell filled with a sweet milk-and-egg custard set soft, dusted with cinnamon.

A South African dessert tart consisting of a sweet short-crust pastry shell filled with a delicate, milk-dominant custard thickened with flour and eggs, finished with a mandatory dusting of ground cinnamon.

A white maize meal porridge cooked to anywhere from a loose, creamy consistency (slap pap) to a stiff, crumbly mass (stywe pap / uphuthu), serving as the daily carbohydrate staple across virtually all communities in South Africa and surrounding nations.

A Cape Malay dish of fried white fish layered with onions in a spiced, curried onion-vinegar sauce and left to mature before serving cold.

A layered meat-and-vegetable stew cooked slowly and undisturbed in a cast-iron three-legged pot over coals.

A naturally caffeine-free herbal infusion made from the oxidised leaves of the rooibos shrub, a fynbos plant endemic to South Africa's Cederberg mountains.

Twice-baked South African dried bread or biscuit, baked then slow-dried until hard and rock-dry, made to be dunked in coffee, tea or rooibos.

A Southern African staple of dried, crushed (stamped) maize kernels slow-cooked together with sugar beans until soft, creamy and porridge-like, known in isiXhosa as umngqusho.

A South African Cape dish of whole butterflied snoek fish grilled over open coals and basted with an apricot-jam-based glaze.

Cape Malay marinated meat skewers — typically lamb — steeped in a sweet-spiced curry marinade with tamarind and dried apricots, then grilled over fire.

A Xhosa staple of samp (crushed dried white maize) simmered slowly with sugar beans into a hearty, soft pottage.

A deep-fried ball of yeasted wheat dough, eaten plain, with jam, or split and filled with curried mince.

A Cape Afrikaner lamb stew slow-braised with waterblommetjies (Cape pondweed flowers) and a sour-onion base.