Bredie, sosatie, denningvleis, snoek, the gatsby. Cape Town's best known dishes were assembled in kitchens staffed by enslaved people, in fishing harbours and in Cape Flats takeaways. The words carry the history.
The kitchen was the first archive
Almost every dish on this page was cooked first by people who had no say in being here. The Cape Town Museum records that about 63,000 people were brought to the Cape as forced labour between 1658 and 1807, from Madagascar, South Asia, South East Asia, East Africa and, in the early Dutch East India Company years, West Africa. Its Leeuwenhof research puts names to some of that work: Francois and Apol, both from Mauritius, cooking; September of Batavia making shoes; Cato and Snap, also from Batavia, in the garden. Slavery at the Cape ended on 1 December 1834, with four more years of so called apprenticeship after that.
That is the ground under the recipes. In her chapter Kitchen Language, in Regarding Muslims (Wits University Press, 2014), Gabeba Baderoon argues that bright images of Cape Muslim food came to stand in for the Cape itself while the slavery that produced the food was written out of the picture. It is worth holding on to that while reading on. A bredie is not a quaint old recipe. It is what people made out of what they were given.
Our guide to why Cape Town food is so good covers the climate, the two oceans and the restaurant scene. This page is about where the dishes came from and whose hands made them.
The words give it away
The clearest evidence is in the dictionary. The Dictionary of South African English traces bredie, the Cape word for a slow stew, to a traveller's account of 1815 which says that breedi meant spinach in the Madagascar tongue and that the word was brought to the Cape by enslaved people. The dictionary also offers a possible Portuguese root in bredo, a kind of amaranth eaten as a vegetable. By 1890 A.G. Hewitt's Cape Cookery is listing pumpkin, tomato, cabbage and cauliflower bredies, and the compounds have kept multiplying since.
Sosatie runs the same way. The dictionary takes it through South African Dutch sasaatje back to Javanese sesate, skewered meat, and its earliest Cape citation is from 1833. Denningvleis is denning, adapted from the Malay dendeng, strips of spiced dried meat, plus the Afrikaans vleis. Writing for New Frame and the Daily Maverick in 2020, Ishay Govender reports that Fatima Sydow and Cass Abrahams trace the dish to the West Sumatran dengdeng, and that the Cape version is slow cooked with black pepper and tamarind. Sydow called it the dish you make when there is money for meat.
Say them out loud and the sea routes are audible. Bredie is roughly BREE-dee, sosatie soo-SAH-tee, denningvleis DEN-ning-flayss.
Bobotie, and why nobody should state its origin flatly
Bobotie, spiced mince baked under a savoury custard, is the dish most often called South Africa's national dish and the one most often explained badly. The dictionary is careful with it: a traditional dish, probably of Malay origin, with the word traced through South African Dutch boboti and probably adapted from the Malay bumbu, curry spices. Its earliest quotation is from 1870.
The line you will meet everywhere, that the first bobotie recipe was printed in a Dutch cookbook in 1609, is not established. In the dictionary it appears only inside a quotation from 1977, which records that somebody wrote it rather than showing it to be true. A rival account derives the dish from the Indonesian bobotok, which is a different thing on the plate. Govender's response is the honest one: working out who made it first is futile, because food moved in both directions between conquered places and conquerors. Attribute the story or call it disputed, then get on with the eating.
The name itself is argued about
Cape Malay is not a neutral label. South African History Online notes that Malay at the Cape covered far more people than those from the Malay peninsula, in large part because Malay was the lingua franca of the Indonesian archipelago and was widely spoken here. Govender reports that the community's roots lie more accurately in Indonesia, in Aceh, Sulawesi and Java, than in Malaysia, and quotes the writer Rustum Kozain, who learned as a child that "Cape Malay was an apartheid term" and that what mattered was being Muslim. Plenty of people use Cape Malay warmly, about cooking above all. Plenty of others prefer Cape Muslim. Both are in daily use in this city, and it is worth knowing why before choosing one.
Who was allowed to write the food down matters just as much. Govender records that it was only in 1988 that Faldela Williams became the first Cape Muslim cook to publish into the mainstream, with The Cape Malay Cookbook, and that Cass Abrahams went on to describe the cuisine as food from Africa in her 1995 book, crediting Khoekhoe influence that earlier white authors had passed over.
The sea
The other half of Cape Town's food history comes off the boats. Snoek shaped the year here: a long, oily, strongly flavoured fish, salted and dried, hawked from wagons and later from bakkies, announced in the streets when the first catch of the season landed.
The harbours carry their own history. Writing for New Frame and the Daily Maverick in 2021, Atiyyah Khan describes Kalk Bay as a fishing village where hand line fishing has passed down through generations, where Filipino settlers arrived around the 1850s, and where the harbour changed the village completely in the twentieth century. In 1967 most of the bay was declared a white area, but the fishing families were given a fifteen year reprieve because they had to live near their boats, which is how one part of Kalk Bay stayed mixed through apartheid. Khan also records what the fishers say now: the runs are a fraction of what they were, and much of the snoek sold at the harbour is trucked down from the west coast.
The Cape Flats made its own food
In 1950 the Cape Flats was, in South African History Online's description, practically uninhabited, crossed by a single narrow road. The Group Areas Act of that year turned it into what the same page calls the dumping ground, as families were removed from the central and western suburbs that had been reserved for white residents. Athlone, Bonteheuwel, Hanover Park, Manenberg and Mitchells Plain are all on that list.
Food followed people. The gatsby belongs to Athlone. The salomie, a thick, flaky, buttery Cape roti wrapped around a curry and eaten in one hand, belongs to the takeaway counters of Wynberg, Gatesville and the Foreshore. These are not novelty items. They are the food of a corner shop economy that formed because the formal one was closed to the people who built it, the same economy we wrote about in our guide to township economies. A quarter gatsby split four ways is a way of feeding people, and so is a bredie stretched with vegetables, what Govender calls langsouskos, food with enough sauce to go round.
What grows here
And then there is the Cape itself, which supplies the one ingredient nobody imported. Waterblommetjies are the flower spikes of a water plant of Western Cape marshes and the Cape Flats, cooked into a bredie with meat, onions and potatoes for a few months of the year. It is the most local dish in the city and the hardest to fake, because the season decides.
Why it matters now
Cape Town sells its food hard, and the selling tends to flatten it. Read the words instead. Bredie comes from Madagascar by way of enslaved households. Sosatie comes from Java. Denningvleis comes from Sumatra. Blatjang comes from a Malay shrimp paste and ends up as apricot chutney. The gatsby comes from a sandwich made for four workers in Athlone in 1976. Every one of those is a movement of people, most of them forced, and the kitchen is where the record survived when the archive did not. The language kept the same receipts, which is the story we tell in /en/cape-town-explained/language-history/.