Behind Boerewors
By Jaco Prinsloo
From behind the halved-out metal oil-drum that serves as her fire pit, Mama Faku has a clear line-of-sight in both a northerly and southerly direction. Stretched out on a treeless, sandy plain towards the north, her right, lies the township of Motherwell, her home just inland of the southeastern coast of South Africa. Far away, to her front and left, are the glinting high-rises of the modest inner city of Gqeberha, and in between, the long stretches of highway that ferry her customer base to and fro.
Mama Faku has a street-food stall on the dusty sidewalk of Motherwell’s main thoroughfare, and whenever she sees a minibus taxi or hulking city bus from either direction, which is very often, she fans the smouldering embers in her oil drum with a paper plate, at once driving the heat to a crackling sizzle and wafting meaty, smoky aromas from her open grill towards open passenger windows. It’s her simplest marketing technique, but it’s mightily effective. In an instant, disembarking passengers are lining up at her stall in their numbers, hungry stomachs grumbling for that one thing that any South African can identify with their nose from a distance: boerewors off the braai.
The word boerewors translates from Afrikaans as “farmer’s sausage,” an appropriate, if incomplete, description. It certainly is a sausage, being derived from the Dutch verste worst. The Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonizers, were also certainly farmers who. And depending on who’s you eat, or who you speak to, boerewors’ flavor profile, like its history, can be as simple or complex as you make it.
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Boerewors is a coarse-grind, generally thick, predominantly beef sausage that by law must contain at least 90 percent total meat and no more than 30 percent fat. It is flavored heavily with coriander, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and salt, and then traditionally stuffed into pig or sheep intestines and coiled into six-foot-long continuous rolls. It is a legally protected term, and anything else that does not conform to the meat-content requirement may not be called boerewors; it must be labeled accordingly just as ‘wors’ along with a description of its main meat component, which is often from wild game like kudu.
Boerewors is also one of South Africa’s most iconic and ubiquitous dishes, and at the Karoo Butchery, on the main street of Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape, Lucky Scritch has been making fresh boerewors according to that general recipe almost daily for the past 28 years.
On a simmering summer’s morning in February, Scritch bounds to action to prepare the day’s first batch as soon as the town’s occasionally intermittent power supply flickers back on around 10:00. The Karoo Butchery prepares its popular biltong, mostly from silverside or other similar cuts of the highest grade of animal, piles of which were already portioned earlier that morning by Scritch and his apprentice, the gangly Thembelani Lolwana. The trimmings and end-pieces from those silversides form the basis of the boerewors. the meat’s A3 grading is, according to the man himself, the not-so-secret ingredient.
In the refrigerated rear room of the butchery, among gleaming steel tables, freshly butchered carcasses and walls lined with colorfully handled butcher’s knives, Scritch explains the critical role of quality, while Lolwana handles the initial round of seasoning and mixing.
“Some boerewors uses the tougher cuts from inferior or older animals, and you taste the difference immediately,” Scritch says. “We only source the freshest we can find, and we make it every day so the stock in our fridges doesn’t stand too long.”
In between words of patient guidance to Thembelani, and with one supervisory eye cast as his apprentice measures out then pours over a litre of brown vinegar, the trilingual middle-aged Xhosa man produces the packet of spice mix for the all-important next step, the final seasoning of the meat.
The base flavors of all boerewors are the same, but varying ratios of those spices distinguish individual recipes distinguish themselves and define an array of different styles, often named for their region of origin. The precise ratios remain a matter of high secret, and owner Johan Swart, leaning languidly against a door frame and providing running commentary on the entire process, is coy when pressed on which component dominates his particular recipe.
“Oh, you know,” he smiles, “a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Probably a bit more coriander and nutmeg than most.” It’s the factory-standard answer of all boerewors-makers.
Scritch pierces the corner of the spice packet with the razor tip of a filleting knife, then empties all but the dregs over roughly 30 kg’s of meat. He and Lolwana dig in their arms up to their elbows, and as they carefully churn the mixture by hand to ensure that almost every individual cube is seasoned, Swart describes the significance of each step in intimate detail.
The gray-haired, broad-shouldered Afrikaner has owned and operated the butchery for more than 40 years. His detailed description, delivered at a slight shout over the drone of the walk-in freezers, reveals the intricate process of making boerewors.
“We spice it at this stage, because once it’s gone through the grinder, you want to handle it as little as possible,” says Swart. “And your grinder blades have to be as sharp as you can get them, because you want to slice the chunks, instead of mashing them.”
This is to ensure a fuller texture and consistency, and to retain as much flavor as possible throughout the cooking process.
“We also don’t add extra fat, because the way in which we trim the silversides ensures a high enough fat content for proper flavor.”
The base flavors of all boerewors are the same, but varying ratios of those spices distinguish individual recipes distinguish themselves and define an array of different styles, often named for their region of origin. Photo by Harry Cunningham on Unsplash.
Once the meat is seasoned through, Scritch and Lolwana gently tip the mixture into the stainless-steel feeding bowl of the meticulously polished grinder that is as old as the butchery itself. Then the motor grunts loudly to action, and all talk is drowned out.
The ground beef is then transferred to an upright steel tube of a foot or so in diameter, held in place on top of a square base by guiding rods and a circular steel halo. Scritch screws down the lid, and attaches the feeding tube onto which the natural intestines are rolled and spaced. He creates the desired thickness by using intestines of varying diameters, and by pinching the thumb and forefinger of his right hand into a round shape, while his left hand guides and his right leg activates the stuffer by toggling a lever.
In an instant, meat whooshes into the intestines at a swift pace that, along with Scritch’s tight finger control, prevents air pockets forming in the sausage. After a few exhibitory rounds he is relieved by Eunice Mapapu. The hugely talented rookie has only been stuffing wors for a few months and uses a slightly different pinch technique to achieves the same blistering speed and consistent results as the seasoned veteran. Within a matter of 20 minutes, the day’s entire batch of boerewors has been stuffed to various thicknesses to satisfy differing customer preferences, and the aroma of freshly butchered meat with undertones of coriander and nutmeg wafts into the storefront.
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The town of Kirkwood is, in spite of its English name, a quintessentially Afrikaner farming town on the fertile banks of the Sundays River, in the southeastern extreme of the country. It lies at the very edge of the vast, semi-arid plain called the Karoo, the central highland region of the country and the cultural heartland of Afrikaners, and therefore also of boerewors.
On the 6th of April 1652, the Dutch navigator and colonial administrator Johan Anthoniszoon (known as ‘Jan’) van Riebeeck arrived at the rocky shores of Table Bay at what was later to be called Cape Town, at the time known as the rather infamous Cape of Storms. He had been sent by the Dutch East India Company with instructions to establish a refreshment station at the Cape to supply ships on the burgeoning and crucial sea trade route to India. He was instructed to build a fort, secure an anchorage in Table Bay and establish agriculture in order to properly service the refreshment station. History would prove him to be the first colonizer of the southern tip of Africa.
As the refreshment station grew and prospered, more Dutch settlers arrived, soon followed by a strong contingent of French Huguenots, Germans and eventually Brits. From this cultural amalgamation eventually began to develop a separate, new identity: an ethnically European redoubt at the southern tip of Africa, speaking a language that was for the most part Dutch in origin. That language was called Afrikaans, and the emerging ethnic group called themselves Afrikaners and sometimes boers or quite simply, farmers.
For a while, being a boer meant being a pastoralist, agriculturalist or trader. They farmed fruit, including wine grapes to gradually grow their Cape settlement.
They took the Afrikaans language, the first text of which was written in Arabic, and embellished around it an entire culture. They wrote for themselves an origin story that was fact, fantasy, folklore and white supremacy in roughly equal measure. This story contained elements of hard work, pioneering spirit, colonialist endeavour and self-righteous conquest over a continent.
After the Dutch were belatedly booted out of the Cape as colonialist overlords by the British at the turn of the 19th century, the Afrikaners loaded their ox-wagons and took any and all roads away from perceived oppression. They left behind the lush farmlands and moderate climate at the Cape and traversed the arid, desolate Karoo, crossing the Orange and Vaal Rivers and clambering over the towering Drakensberg Mountains towards the north and east, into the lands of the abaThembu and amaMpondo, the amaZulu, Sotho, and Swazi, and the Khoi and the San, in a mass inland migration named quite simply The Great Trek.
By the end of the Second World War a little over a century later, through shrewd leadership, political wrangling, discriminatory policies, cultural preferentialism and racial exclusivity, the Afrikaner had managed to firmly entrench himself as the dominant political and cultural force in the country, even though they made up less than 20% of the population at the time.
On the 6th of April every year, those white Afrikaners commemorated the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape as the birth of their nation. And on each of those occasions, on white-linen tablecloths at bazaars and country fairs in whitewashed neighborhoods and quaint country towns like Kirkwood, their culinary heritage of biltong, beskuit and boerewors would be the centrepieces of festivities.
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Of course, when van Riebeeck and his party of eight women and 82 men stepped onto African soil on that day in 1652, they were not the first inhabitants of that southernmost edge.
He was greeted in Table Bay by the Khoi people, the Indigenous group related to the Bushmen, or San people, who are considered among the oldest human societies on earth, and who had been present on the subcontinent for, by some estimates, 80,000 years. Some of the nomadic hunter-gatherer San at some point acquired livestock and settled along the southwestern and eastern coast of the country,to eventually develop into the culturally related but distinct group known variously as the Khoekhoe, Khoikhoi or Khoi people, who had been providing fresh water and supplies to passing ships since Europeans first began rounding the bottom end of Africa at the end of the 15th century.
The Khoi of the Cape peninsula looked on, from a safe distance at first, as van Riebeeck’s settlement got off to a less-than-auspicious start. After heavy initial hardships and a number of catastrophically failed harvests, the settlement at the Cape began to find its feet, and as the vineyards took and the crops settled, the settlement became a Dutch colony and soon, that colony had a labor shortage.
The nomadic pastoralist Khoi, used to roaming the seasons in search of prime grazing ground for their massive herds of cattle, were suddenly kicked off their own fertile land. They were, unsurprisingly, unwilling for the most to fill that shortage. So, the colony answered the demand for free labor in the way that European colonies best knew how: by bringing in enslaved people from elsewhere.
The Amersfoort, a Dutch East India merchant ship, on the 28th of March 1658 carrying on board 174 people. Soon, enslaved people began arriving from Mozambique, Madagascar and elsewhere on the continent, from as far afield as South and Southeast Asia, or from anywhere that Europeans were trading human bodies for profit. Historian Robert Shell has estimated that, by the time slavery at the Cape was abolished in 1808, 63,000 human beings had been imported to the Cape colony.
With the sudden confluence of cultures, and the resultant confusion of languages and dialects, came the pressing need for enslaved people to easily communicate with one another, and the only common linguistic denominator was the language of the masters. So, they took the High Dutch of the first settlers and infused it with Malay, Portuguese, Indonesian, sprinklings of Arabic, French and German and elements of the indigenous Khoi and San languages to produce something that was at first derogatively known as kitchen Dutch, but was later to evolve into the often guttural-sounding yet florally expressive language called Afrikaans.
As in all similar societies, enslaved people did anything and everything they were forced to:. They tilled the soil, tended the crops and herded the animals that were to sustain the refreshment station and thus European maritime trade with the East. They cleared farmyards and built the mansions of the increasingly thriving colonists, raising their children and managing and maintaining their households. They fathered illegitimate children for lonely boers on isolated farms. And they cooked.
The Mediterranean climate at the Cape was conducive to agriculture, and the soil in the foothills and river valleys slightly north of Table Bay was fertile and receptive to grapes, grains, seeds and soft fruits. Fresh produce and quality meat were, for the most part, readily or seasonally available to cooks, and with Table Bay being such a crucial layover and trading point on the Indies sea route, so were the spices from home.
As enslaved people made do with language, so they did with food, by adopting and adapting. With European palates not being used to the heavily spiced cuisines, cooks gradually introduced flavors, developing new dishes that often incorporated a number of the influences prevalent in the environment, but always strongly based on the recipes they were familiar with.
“The Malayans and Indonesians at the Cape cooked the dishes they knew, and then incorporated elements that the Dutch enjoyed,” explains author, food historian and South African cuisine expert Cass Abrahams. She ascribes to this process the origins of another dish characteristic of so-called Cape Malay cuisine, the boboti’: spiced beef mince mixed with raisins or sultanas and baked with a whisked-egg topping. “The Dutch liked to cook with fruit, and the Indonesians with spices like nutmeg, cloves, bay leaves, coriander. Dishes like bobotie were simply a natural outcome of that cultural contact.”
According to Abrahams, Cape Malay food was most strongly influenced by Indonesian cooking, and regardless of the slightly confusing geographical reference, the Malay influence left an indelible imprint on South African cuisine, creating a taste for simple, spice-heavy, use-everything dishes high in nutrition and with deceptively complex flavors.
“Those spices have permeated all the emblematic South African dishes, from curried fish to denningvleis, to biltong and milk tart,” says Abrahams.
Abrahams, despite being widely acknowledged as a foremost expert on Cape Malay cuisine, insists the term does not, or at least should not, exist.
“It’s just South African cuisine,” she says. “Things like boerewors and bobotie have shed their roots to become unique to the country. They’ve taken a bit from here and a bit from there, and created something that is completely new.”
She shares an anecdote from the early 1970s, when she cooked for her husband’s rugby club in what would at the time have been a “coloured” community, segregated by government mandate.
“I made lasagnas, but I used the green noodles and, of course, I spiced the meat in the way that we like. The day after the match, all the players’ mothers phoned me, asking what that green dish was that I cooked for their sons. They were all looking for the recipe, but they’d never heard of lasagna before! The real Italian mamas would be horrified if they saw what we did to their dish, and insist we don’t call it lasagna. But that’s how we do it, you know? We cook it like it we want to eat it.”
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Braai is an Afrikaans word, with chesa nyama its isiZulu equivalent that describes not only the over-the-coals, direct-heat cooking method, the devices that are used to achieve it and the informal restaurants at which it’s served, but also the universally popular social event at which it usually occurs. Photo by Bothar at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
All the various South African cultures have traditionally employed outdoors, fire-based cooking, historically out of necessity or convenience, but since the middle and latter stages of the 20th century, increasingly for enjoyment. The temperate, largely warm and sunny climate ensured that the braai or chesa nyama has become a central cultural touchstone. Braai is an Afrikaans word, with chesa nyama its isiZulu equivalent that describes not only the over-the-coals, direct-heat cooking method, the devices that are used to achieve it and the informal restaurants at which it’s served, but also the universally popular social event at which it usually occurs.
The richness and spiciness of boerewors are perfectly complimented by the smoky flavors produced by grilling over an open flame, and those together seem to go well with whatever accompaniment any South African subculture has been able to muster, from fatty lamb chops to thick-cut beef steaks; from chakalaka and puthu pap porridge to potato salads and flame-grilled cheese, tomato and onion sandwiches. When the culturally diverse customers of the Karoo Butchery each in turn are posed the question of why exactly boerewors is such a cornerstone of any braai, the answer is always equally indeterminate, and yet resoundingly conclusive: It just works with everything.
“It’s an absolute braai essential!” exclaims Hillary Biller, award-winning cooking show host, cookbook author and food editor of the Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest Sunday newspaper. “It’s so much a part of our identity, and it’s unique to our country, so there’s a sense of pride and heritage that comes with boerewors.”
She adds that its popularity as a portable street food has been enhanced by its affordability, accessibility and convenience.
Renowned celebrity chef and restaurateur Reuben Riffel labels boerewors “the food of the people,” and ascribes its universal appeal to a combination of three things: the braai culture, a shared love for meat and quite simply, because it tastes good. He regularly serves boerewors to his loved ones but always keeps it simple. He wraps it in a fresh bread-roll and tops with his homemade sweet-and-sour sauce: his personal spin on the widely adored boerie roll.
Riffel believes that the simplicity is essential because, having transcended the concepts of recipe or dish, boerewors describes a particular feeling and a distinct picture. As long as that’s honored, you can serve boerewors any way you like, or with anything you like, regardless of where it, or you, came from. In the end, the Afrikaners were right about boerewors, just not in the way they intended. South Africans today are not ignorant to the cultural origin of boerewors; after all, it remains right there in the name. They’ve simply adopted and adapted, and made it work for them.
