Bobotie Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Bobotie is a dish of the Cape region of South Africa: minced meat topped with an egg custard and baked. It took its present form during the Cape Colony period, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The dating rests on firm scholarly ground, but the question of where the dish came from is another matter, and two lineages still cross in its history.

The lamb or beef mince at its heart had been easy to come by at the Cape from early times. What turns the dish golden and carries its flavour are Asian spices such as turmeric, cumin and coriander, and getting them onto Cape tables took a long sea voyage. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company (VOC) set up a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope. From then on, spices began to reach the port town, and the curry-coloured bobotie came into being.

One view holds that bobotie grew out of the home cooking of the people the VOC brought to the Cape as slaves from Java and elsewhere, the community known as the Cape Malays. In this telling, they made meat dishes at home, seasoned with whatever Asian spices they could get. Bobotie as it is made today is meat under an egg-and-milk custard, set firm in a hearth or oven, with the flavour of Asian spices layered through it.

Two popular stories have been widely told about bobotie's past. One concerns its name; the other, the whereabouts of its oldest recipe.

The name was commonly said to come from boemboe, a word for curry spices, or from bubur, meaning porridge. But a 2018 paper on loanwords by Tom Hoogervorst, published in the journal Itinerario, showed that neither derivation works, either in sound or in meaning. The name goes back to bebotok, a Javanese-Malay dish of spiced meat or fish wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. The name of the dish points to a link with Javanese food culture. As a word of the Cape, boboti(e) is reported to appear as the name of a cooking vessel in colonial household inventories.

The second story holds that the oldest bobotie recipe is printed in a Dutch cookbook of 1609. It is an often-quoted line, yet trace it to its source and no firm basis turns up for identifying the cookbook in question. It was a saying with nothing to stand on.

That leaves the form of the dish, meat baked under a custard, and its own lineage. One view places the practice of layering minced meat with an egg-and-milk custard and baking it in a European line that reaches back to the Roman Apicius and his patinam ex lacte (first century, though it uses none of the curry spices such as turmeric). Claassens discusses this lineage in a 2003 doctoral thesis, though the thesis is reported to have been unable to show from the documents a European origin at the Cape.

Put the two lineages together and one reading emerges: an older European meat custard without curry spices came first, and at the Cape it took on Asian spices and changed. Even so, the Asian lineage the linguistics points to and the European lineage the food history traces rest on separate sources and still stand opposed; neither has won out. The one certain thing is that bobotie cannot be reduced to a single place of origin.