Food History of Cape Town

Key eras

The Company's Garden (1652, the refreshment station)

The Dutch East India Company landed at Table Bay in 1652 to grow food for scurvy-ridden crews rounding the Cape. The Company's Garden below the mountain was a working vegetable plot long before it was a park, and it fixed the pattern the city still follows: everything grows within an hour of the table.

Bo-Kaap and the spice trade (1658 to 1808, slavery and the Cape Malay kitchen)

Enslaved and exiled people were shipped to the Cape from the Indonesian archipelago, Bengal, Madagascar and the East African coast. Sheikh Yusuf arrived from Makassar as a political exile in 1694. Their cooks folded Asian spice into Dutch stewing, and the result is the bredie, bobotie, sosatie and koesister that Bo-Kaap kitchens still make.

Constantia (1685, Constantia and the wine farms)

Governor Simon van der Stel was granted the Constantia land in 1685 and planted vines on its south-east slopes. Under the Cloete family, who held the estate from 1779 to 1885, Constantia dessert wine became one of the most sought-after sweet wines in Europe. The estate began making it again in 2003 after more than a century.

Pinotage (1924, a grape bred for the Cape)

Abraham Izak Perold, the first professor of viticulture at Stellenbosch University, crossed Pinot Noir with Cinsaut in 1924. The first wine from the cross was made at Elsenburg in 1941, and Stellenbosch Farmers' Winery put the name Pinotage on a Lanzerac label in 1961. It remains South Africa's signature grape.

The removals (1966 to 1982, District Six)

On 11 February 1966 the government declared District Six a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act. Removals began in 1968, and by 1982 more than 60,000 people had been moved to the Cape Flats about 25 kilometres away. The city lost its most mixed neighbourhood, and its cooking scattered into Athlone, Bonteheuwel and Mitchells Plain.

Athlone invents a sandwich (1976, the Gatsby)

Rashaad Pandy, who ran Super Fisheries in Athlone, fed a crew of labourers in 1976 with a full loaf packed with slap chips, polony and atchar, cut into wedges. One of the workers called it a Gatsby smash, after the film showing nearby, and the name stuck. It is now the Cape Flats contribution every Cape Town menu borrows.

A restaurant city (1994 to today, the Bree Street decades)

After 1994 the city's cooking stopped apologising for itself. Bree Street, Loop Street and the Old Biscuit Mill filled with chef-owned rooms, the Winelands built tasting menus worth a day trip, and the farmers markets at Oranjezicht and the V&A put small Western Cape growers in front of the people who eat their produce.

Immigrant influences

• Indonesian, Malay and Bengali (Cape Malay): Brought to the Cape in bondage from the 1650s. Their kitchens gave the city bobotie, bredie, sosaties, samoosas, koesisters and the habit of cooking meat with fruit and warm spice.
• Xhosa: Carried umngqusho, samp and beans, tripe and the open-fire braai into the Cape Flats and the townships, where shisanyama butcheries now grill to order every weekend.
• Dutch and French Huguenot: Settled from 1652 and 1688 respectively, planting the Constantia and Franschhoek vineyards and leaving behind melktert, potjiekos, koeksisters and a national appetite for preserved fruit.
• Indian: Traders and labourers who arrived from the 1860s onward, selling roti, curry, atchar and masala by the scoop. Athlone and Rylands still run many of the city's curry counters.
• Portuguese: Arrived from Madeira, then from Angola and Mozambique after 1975, bringing peri-peri chicken, prego rolls, salted cod and the corner cafe that sells all three.
• Lithuanian Jewish: Settled around Sea Point and Gardens from the 1880s, opening bakeries and delicatessens. Their kitchens gave the city pickled herring, rye bread, cheesecake and the kosher butcher.
• Greek: Ran fish and chip shops, milk bars and corner cafes across the city through the twentieth century, and are the reason a Cape Town fish shop still sells calamari next to the chips.
• Chinese: Present since the nineteenth century and growing quickly after 2000. Sea Point and Rylands carry the noodle houses, dumpling counters and Chinese supermarkets the city's cooks now shop in.
• Congolese, Nigerian and Ghanaian: Arrived in numbers from the 1990s and built the West African cooking of Observatory, Maitland and the city centre, from fufu and egusi to suya grilled on the pavement.
• Zimbabwean and Malawian: The backbone of the city's professional kitchens since the 2000s, and the reason sadza, kapenta and chibuku turn up in Cape Town's informal eating houses.

Signature innovations

• Bobotie, spiced minced meat under a set egg-and-milk custard, baked with bay leaves
• The Gatsby, a full roll of slap chips and masala steak cut into shareable wedges
• Shisanyama, buy your meat at the butchery counter and have it grilled on the spot
• Pinotage, bred at Stellenbosch in 1924 from Pinot Noir and Cinsaut
• Waterblommetjiebredie, a lamb stew built on the Cape pond weed that flowers in winter
• Koesisters, the spiced Cape Malay syrup doughnut rolled in coconut, sold on Sunday mornings
• Snoek braaied whole and basted with apricot jam, the West Coast Sunday standard
• Biltong and droewors, air-dried meat cured with coriander and vinegar rather than smoke
• Potjiekos, the three-legged cast-iron pot cooked slowly over coals without stirring
• Melktert, a cinnamon-dusted milk tart with a pastry shell and no eggs on top
• Malva pudding, an apricot-jam sponge soaked in hot cream straight from the oven
• Cape brandy, distilled at the Cape since 1672 and now the base of the local sour