KnowledgeBase - a glimpse into a virtual pantry.

Ingredients form the building blocks of cooking. Throughout the world, every day, millions of people gather basic ingredients, no matter how many or how humble, and turn them into a meal. Learning about new ingredients enables the home cook to adapt, discover and experiment. Foods and ingredients are depicted in full colour, tastes, aromas and flavours are described, encouraging cooks to investigate and try new things for themselves.

RecipeBook - a mouth-watering culinary journey.

East meets West, that's how the cuisine of South Africa can be described, where Indian curries meet British meat pies and Dutch cookies meet Indonesian chutney. The origins and development of South African culinary tradition are as diverse as the peoples who make up the population of South Africa, a potpourri of African, Eastern and Western foods and flavours. We are certain you will enjoy exploring the unique tastes of our recipes.

The cuisine of South Africa has had a variety of sources and stages starting with cookery practised by the indigenous people of South Africa such as the Khoisan and Xhosa- and Sotho-speaking people, progressing through to settler cookery introduced during the colonial period by people of Dutch, German, French and British descent and their slaves and servants - this includes the cuisine of the Cape Malay people, which has many characteristics of Malaysia and Java as well as the foods of the Indians who settled in KwaZulu-Natal, and the recipes from neighbouring colonial cultures such as Portuguese Mozambique. Traditional "Cape Dutch" cookery mixes European cooking with spices like nutmeg, allspice and hot peppers, brought to South Africa from the "East".

To cook well, a cook needs to understand the attributes of ingredients he or she is using. The aroma, taste, texture and colour of an ingredient, how it interacts with other ingredients, how it responds to heat, air, liquid or acid, for example, all affect the end result.

With the advent of modern methods of food transportation and preservation, a cook has an ever-increasing choice of ingredients; ingredients hitherto only available in their place of origin are now on offer in markets all over the world. This affords the home cook much greater scope, and requires more knowledge.

Spice, the very word conjures up visions of exotic tastes and places and well it should. For spices were exotic, especially for Western Europeans. They were sought in far-flung parts of the world for their culinary and in many instances for their medicinal value. Our love affair with spices continues. Today we have the spices of the world at our fingertips and we use them to create the dishes of many cultures. We depend on fresh and dried herbs and spices to enliven our daily meals and to bring fragrance to our lives. We use them to decorate our homes, to scent our clothes and bodies, and as ingredients in a wide range of medicines, cosmetics, alcoholic drinks and food.

South African Terms

Take milk with your rooibos? Fancy some pap with your wors? Brave enough to try some skop or mashonzha? Brush up on your culinary vocabulary with our list of South African food terms and what they mean. South Africa is home to myriad ethnic and racial groups, many of them migrant communities, all of whom have contributed to the country's rich cultural mix. The resultant kaleidoscope - the famous "rainbow" - applies not only to the people but to the food, for one finds in South Africa the most extraordinary range of cuisines.