Food expert Errieda du Toit calls herself a food evangelist. And that she most certainly is. For decades, she has been bringing many cherished heritage dishes to life for successive generations of foodies. She has written many books on South African cuisine and has appeared in local TV shows like In die Sop, Kokkedoor, and MasterChef South Africa.
Recently at Vergenoegd Löw Wine Estate, she began reminiscing about food traditions in the Cape, particularly in Stellenbosch. She reminded us of a letter written by Governor Simon van der Stel (after whom Stellenbosch is named) to his employers, the Dutch East India Company. He governed the Cape from 1679 to 1699, thus overlapping with the time that Pieter de Vos established our farm here, in 1696.
The Dutch East Indies had already been occupied by The Netherlands for 50 years by the time Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652. His assignment was to establish a trading post where ships could replenish food and drink for voyages to and from the East.
But back to Simon van der Stel: reporting to the Lords XVII in Amsterdam on the abundance at the Cape, he wrote in his letter to them: "there’s plenty to drink… enough wheat… and no shortage of meat nor fish."
We know that from the mid-17th century and well into the 18th, the settlers would have brought many food traditions of their own to the Cape from their native Europe (The Netherlands, Flanders, France, and Germany) and later England. But we tend to think of the Dutch East Indies, headquartered at Batavia (Jakarta) as having the most marked influence on our culinary traditions.
C Louis Leipoldt (1880 – 1947), a poet, dramatist, medical doctor and food expert, was among the earliest to formally document Cape culinary history. In his Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery, writing about the beginnings of Cape cuisine, he acknowledged that from the mid-17th century, the settlers here were eating hashed meat, curried sauces and stews that owed their origins to a wide variety of sources, including Italian and Greek traditions. Many will be surprised to discover that our beloved bredies were not locally conceived. They owe their origin to Greek cooks of centuries’ earlier. But he emphasizes: "Undoubtedly the most potent influence on Cape cookery has been the methods, tastes and culinary customs of the Malay cooks brought directly from Java in the early part of the 18th century."
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