Celebrating Heritage Day: Traditional South African cuisine with a modern twist
Creamy samp which is a common traditional dish that can be served on Heritage Day
Image: Instagram/cookingwithzanele
Heritage day is for South Africans to celebrate their cultural heritage and what better way than to enjoy traditional cuisine that is not often eaten.
Traditional food is a part of everyone’s culture and it differs from each culture. IOL spoke to two South African cookbook authors and chefs on the importance of traditional food and how to cook them with a modern twist.
Chef Zanele van Zyl who was raised in Bergville, KwaZulu-Natal, and now divides her time between Johannesburg and Gqeberha, cooking was inspired by her elders and husband.
Van Zyl shared that her go to Zulu traditional meal is Isijingi, which is cooked with butternut, maize meal and a bit of a sugar.
“To make sure that our heritage dishes stay alive, I always try to twist them just to elevate it a bit to make it taste or look like a modern day. But I always want to keep it and I still want to add that element of nowadays taste.”
Sometimes there are misconceptions that people have thinking traditional dishes might not be healthy but van Zyl disputes that saying our traditional dishes are the healthiest dishes you can get because they are mostly organic.
“For me, especially the ones that you get from your home grown, your garden, your chicken that runs around at home, your vegetables you grow in your garden, for me that's the go-to. It's healthy and it will never go out of fashion.”
Food snob and recipe developer Mmule Setati who is also a cookbook author gave her take on heritage day dishes. Setati shared that we have our common dishes, mogudu, trotters but she wants to see people adding twists to the dishes.
“If you are going to make salad, let's add some South African or African favourites which is sorghum.
“Take your salad, some spinach leaves, some beetroot, some feta, some roasted pumpkin or sweet potato, and then add some sorghum in there. Sorghum is good for your guts, good for your health, and it's an African seed and it’s amazing.
“In terms of something savory and nice, stick to the old school stuff. This can be beef, but when you make it, we just add onions, salt, pepper, a little bit of some chicken stock, and little cooking oil. Cook it for a long time so that it's nice, delicious. Of course our favorites such as dumplings.”
Setati adds that a good old braai is a great way to celebrate heritage day and have delicious colours all round and a variety of meals.
The cookbook author emphasised the importance of the health benefits of our African foods and how the older generations were able to live long just off the food they ate as it was unprocessed and had great nutritional value.
IOL