South American Food

The cuisine of South Africa is known for being very colorful, tasteful, and wide array of selection. For the more daring diner, South Africa offers culinary challenges from crocodile sirloins to fried caterpillars to sheep heads. Interesting enough, all three of these food choices are referred to being very delicious. For the diners, who do not want to walk on the “wild side”, there are myriad indigenous delicacies such as biltong (dried salted meth), bobotie (a much-improved version of Shepherd’s pie) and (hand-made farm sausages, grilled on an open flame.

The wide array of selection of South Africa food comes from the history of this country. Early South Africans were mostly hunters and gathers. They depended on foods such as tortoises, crayfish, coconuts, and squash to survive. Biltong , meat that is dried, salted, and spiced (similar to jerky), and beskuits (dried sweetened biscuits, like zwiebeck or rusks) were popular food among the original pioneers and are both still enjoyed by twenty-first century South Africans (Food, 2011). The Bantu, natives of northern Africa, taught residents how to grow vegetables such as corn (“mealies”), squash, and sweet potato (Food, 2011). Many of these vegetables are still used today in popular South African dishes. After 200 years after the Portuguese first arrived in South Africa, Dutch settlers, known as Boers, built the first European settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 (Food, 2011).

The Dutch East India Company decided to establish a refreshment station at Cape, after trying to find a refreshment spot for their merchant ships traveling around Cape to Jave (Indonesia) and back (Ludman, N.D.). At this station, the company was impelled to plant a garden, at the tip of Africa, to establish vegetable gardens to produce the fresh food needed by passing ships (Ludman, N.D.).The establishing of this farm will change the regions style of cuisine forever.

The Dutch East India Company traded between...