Sosaties

Lamb or mutton marinated in a curried sauce is threaded onto skewers with onion, dried apricots or other dried fruit, and sometimes pieces of fat. Sosaties are cooked over hot coals, and they turn up at braais and family gatherings.

The name came into Afrikaans from a Javanese word for skewered meat, and the dish is often compared with the satay of Malaysia and Indonesia. The word appears in print at the Cape in 1833, and a memoir of old Cape Town published in 1885 describes evening eating houses that sold curried mutton skewers with rice.

Sosaties belong, with bredie and denningvleis, to a group of dishes that many people think of as Afrikaans but which have Cape Malay roots.