Bobotie at the Cape: A Dish with a History in Every Cup

I first started looking into bobotie when I wanted to cook an old Cape recipe. The more I read, the more I realised that there was a lot more to the dish than I had expected.I found references to bobotie in household inventories, old cookbooks and South African literature. There were copper pots, porcelain vessels and little individual cups. There were different spellings of the name, and recipes that changed from one generation to the next.

What interested me most was that bobotie had been part of Cape life for a long time before anyone began talking about it as a traditional South African dish. People already knew what it was, and bobotie had its own pots and cups. I wanted to follow that history as far as the records would take me. Eventually, I decided to try one of the old recipes myself, Hildagonda Duckitt’s bobotee, published in 1891.

But the story starts well before that. The earliest documentary evidence I have found is in fact not a recipe. It comes from a household inventory drawn up in Cape Town in March 1752. The estate of Beatrix Louw, widow of onderkoopman Johannes Needer, included an item described as, “1 cooper bobotijkeetel”. In other words, a copper bobotie kettle or pot.

It is a small entry, but it tells us something useful. Bobotie was already a recognised name at the Cape, sufficiently familiar for an inventory clerk to identify a cooking vessel by it.

Of course, the entry does not tell us what went into the pot. We cannot know from this record whether the dish resembled any of the recipes printed a century or more later. I would rather leave that question open than fill in the gaps with ingredients taken from a later cookbook.

What we can say is that, by 1752, the word bobotie was already in use at the Cape, and a particular vessel was associated with its preparation. That is a good place to begin. The early nineteenth-century inventories provide more evidence.

The inventories I have found so far point to bobotie cups being part of the households of some wealthy Cape families. The fifty cups listed in the 1802 inventory of Hendrik Justinus de Wet and Margaretha Jacoba Smuts, and the twenty-six blue porcelain pots recorded in the de Neys household in 1804, are impressive numbers. Both households had considerable possessions. But these records do not suggest that bobotie cups were used mainly by the wealthy. What they do show is that, by the early nineteenth century, bobotie cups and pots were recognised household items, and that some families owned them in large numbers. The spelling of these utensils varies, but the association with bobotie remains.

I find these inventories particularly interesting because they record ordinary household possessions. They are not recipes written for publication, and they are not later recollections of what people might have eaten. They record objects that were in people's homes.

The numbers also make it difficult to dismiss the cups as something unique and unusual. Bobotie had its own equipment, in different materials and in quantities that suggest it was well established in at least some Cape households. The inventories do not tell us exactly how these vessels were used, but later recipes help to explain their place in the kitchen.

Today, most of us probably picture bobotie in one large oven dish, with its egg topping browned on top and rice served alongside it. The old recipes offer another possibility.

A. G. Hewitt’s Cape Cookery: Simple Yet Distinctive, published in 1890, provides important evidence for the use of individual vessels and tamarind in bobotee preparation. In her recipe for “Lamb Bobotee (Lamsch Vleesch)”, the minced meat is seasoned with lemon juice or tamarind water, then combined with eggs and milk and divided among small basins for baking. Hewitt also includes a separate recipe specifically titled “Cup Bobotees”, demonstrating that baking bobotee in individual cups was a recognised preparation in its own right. Then, in 1891, Hildagonda Duckitt gives instructions for making bobotee in little cups, describing this as, “the old Indian way”.

That phrase caught my attention. Here were the cups that had appeared in the old inventories, and here were recipes showing how they were used. Hewitt and Duckitt provide a useful link between the objects people owned and the food they prepared. The individual cups were not simply a way of making an old recipe look attractive. They were part of the documented history of the dish.

The word bobotie itself has left a trail through South African writing. There is Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Iron. At one point in the novel, Tant' Sannie threatens Bonaparte with being beaten until there is not a bone left that has not been broken as fine as “bobotie-meat.” It is an unpleasant threat, but a revealing use of the word. Schreiner does not stop to explain what bobotie is. She uses it as a comparison that her readers are expected to be familiar with.

That is the sort of detail I like finding in an old book. A recipe tells us how someone made a dish. A passing reference in a novel can tell us that the dish was familiar enough to be used metaphorically in everyday language.

The references continue. Hildagonda Duckitt published her recipe in 1891. The word bobotie also appears in South African writing over this period. The Dictionary of South African English records an 1870 reference in the Cape Monthly Magazine, where a contributor signing herself “A Lady” wrote of “‘Babootie’ and ‘frickadel’ and ‘potato-pie’” as improvements on English minced meats. In 1900, the Graaff-Reinet Budget referred to Cape colonials’ fondness for “carbonaatjes, boebootis, and sassatjes”. Dorothea Fairbridge’s Piet of Italy, published in 1913, mentions a man dining on “bobotie and rice”. By 1926, Colin Graham Botha was writing about bobotie in Social Life in the Cape Colony in the 18th Century (pp. 56–57). He included it among foods he considered typical of South African life, alongside bredie, sosaties and kerrie, while noting the influence of the East Indies on Cape cooking. The spelling changed from one source to another: babootie, babotie, bobotie, bobotee, boebooti and bobote.

That is hardly surprising for a word moving between Cape Dutch, Afrikaans and South African English. By the late nineteenth century, bobotie was not just something found in a kitchen. It had become part of the language of the place.

Duckitt's 1891 cookbook, Hilda's “Where Is It?” of Recipes, is where the history became something I could take into my own kitchen. What I particularly like about her bobotee recipe is that she identifies it as, “My mother's Recipe.” It is a small detail, but it matters. She is passing on a family recipe, not claiming to have invented the dish herself. She describes it as, “A delicate Indian minced curry. Malay or Indian.”

I find that wording more useful than a modern attempt to assign bobotie a single, definite origin. Duckitt was writing at a time when people at the Cape had their own understanding of the food they cooked and ate. She identified the dish with Malay or Indian cooking, while also recording that this particular recipe had come from her mother.

Her description does not settle the question of where bobotie began. It does, however, show how she understood the dish in 1891. Her recipe uses meat, onion, bread, milk, curry powder, sugar, lemon or vinegar, almonds and eggs. She also mentions lemon or bay leaves. And then there is the tamarind. Duckitt explains that tamarind can be soaked in boiling water and strained, with the resulting liquid used instead of vinegar. She recommends it for bobotee, sosaties and curries.

I wanted to try that version rather than automatically reaching for vinegar, as I would when making a more familiar modern recipe.

Dried Tamarind

Tamarind gives the dish a different kind of acidity. It has a fruity, slightly earthy flavour that is quite different from the sharper taste of vinegar. More importantly, it is not an ingredient I added because I thought it sounded suitably old-fashioned. Duckitt specifically mentions it. That was reason enough to include it.

One thing becomes clear when you compare the recipes, bobotie has never had just one fixed formula. Hewitt's 1890 versions uses cold cooked meat, butter, bread soaked in gravy, almonds, curry powder, lemon or tamarind water, onion and an egg-and-milk topping. She suggests serving it with rice and chutney.

Duckitt's recipe includes sugar and gives lemon, vinegar or tamarind as ways of providing acidity, corroborating Hewitt's use of tamarind water in her 1890 recipe. She also describes the individual cups, reinforcing the evidence for bobotie being prepared and baked in small individual vessels in the late nineteenth-century Cape.

In 1923, S. H. van Tulleken gives a version using boiled mutton and the meat stock to soak the bread. She includes almonds and even suggests a little bitter almond essence.

C. Louis Leipoldt's 1933 recipe allows for either raw or cooked meat. It includes curry spices, sugar, lemon, vinegar or tamarind, almonds and chilli, with the familiar egg-and-milk topping.

By 1957, a bobotie recipe from Mrs A. Jacobs of Schotsche Kloof, recorded by Hilda Gerber in Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays, includes garlic and turmeric.

There are differences between these recipes, but there is also a recognisable pattern: meat, bread, onion, curry, some form of acidity, eggs and milk. Almonds appear repeatedly, as do bay or lemon leaves used in the baking dish or mixture.

The familiar modern combination of turmeric, raisins, chutney and a sweeter curry mixture is not present in every early recipe. We should not assume that every ingredient now associated with bobotie has always been essential to it. The recipes show a dish that changed as people cooked it in their own kitchens. That is more interesting to me than trying to identify one version as the only authentic one.

Portraits of Louis Leipoldt and Hildagonda Duckitt in the Towerwater dining room

Leipoldt is worth mentioning because of his interest in Cape cooking and his respect for earlier recipe collections. His Kos vir die Kenner, published in 1933, retains many of the features found in Duckitt's bobotee, finely minced meat, bread soaked in milk, onion, curry spices, sugar, lemon, almonds and an egg-and-milk topping.

He also allows for tamarind water instead of vinegar. That is an important detail for my purposes. Tamarind was not just an oddity in Duckitt's recipe. It appears  in earlier and later Cape cookbooks.

Tamarind Water

The recipes are not identical, and I would not claim that one proves the exact history of the other. But together they show that tamarind had a place in the Cape bobotie tradition. It gave me another reason to stick with Duckitt's version.

I don't think the evidence allows us to reduce bobotie to one simple origin story. Duckitt's description is “Malay or Indian”. That is how she chose to describe it, and I think it is worth preserving her wording rather than forcing it into a modern category.

The Cape was shaped by people and traditions from many places. Dutch and other European cooking came into contact with food traditions brought from South and Southeast Asia, including those carried by people who arrived through the VOC world, many of them enslaved.

Ingredients, cooking methods and words travelled. Cooks adapted them to the ingredients available to them and to the tastes of the households in which they worked.

Food historian Hester Claassens has cautioned against the simple claim that bobotie originated solely with enslaved people. Her work points to older European culinary antecedents as well as the importance of Asian influences in Cape cooking.

That does not mean Asian influence should be played down, nor does it settle every question about the dish's origins. It means the history is more complicated than assigning bobotie to one country or one group of people.

The records tell us something more immediate. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bobotie was being recognised, prepared and discussed at the Cape. It had become part of local household life. Whatever the earlier influences, there was a Cape bobotie.

By this point, I had the 1752 inventory, the nineteenth-century lists of pots and cups, Hewitt's recipes and Duckitt's description of the old Indian way of preparing bobotee. I wanted to bring some of that evidence together in a dish I could actually cook.

I chose Duckitt's recipe because it gave me several clear details to follow. It was identified as her mother's recipe, she described it as Malay or Indian, she mentioned the individual cups, and she gave tamarind as an alternative to vinegar. I used tamarind rather than simply substituting vinegar. I made the bobotie in individual ovenproof cups, and I kept the almonds and the egg-and-milk topping.

The cups were probably the most satisfying part of the exercise. I had spent time reading inventories that listed bobotie cups and pots, and now I was using cups to prepare a recipe that specifically described that method. It was a small connection, but a real one. I wasn't trying to make a modern bobotie look old. I was following a method recorded in a historical recipe.

When the cups came out of the oven, with the topping set and lightly browned, I served them with rice. I found myself thinking about the old inventory entries again. Someone had owned those copper pots and porcelain cups. Someone had cooked bobotie in them. The people who used those vessels did not need a history of the dish to tell them what the word meant. They already knew.

I cannot claim that my version tasted exactly like Duckitt's mother's bobotee. We don't have enough information to know that. Nor can I claim that it represents the original bobotie. But I had followed the details she left us, and that was the point.

Looking back over the evidence, I find it difficult to think of bobotie as simply a recipe passed down unchanged through the generations. The inventories, cookbooks and literary references show different aspects of its history, but no single source gives us the complete story.

I wanted to cook something that connected the food on my table with the records I had been reading. When I served those little cups with yellow rice, the connection between the old records and the food in front of me felt surprisingly direct. Although the old recipes do not all specify yellow rice, it has become a familiar accompaniment to bobotie, often cooked with turmeric, sugar, cinnamon and raisins.

Yellow rice with raisins the classic accompaniment with bobotie

All the bobotie recipes discussed in this post are recorded in their original form, along with adapted versions for the modern kitchen, in the companion post, Historical Bobotie Recipes.

Historical Sources Consulted

Estate inventories, Cape of Good Hope

The following estate inventories record the use of the word bobotie and the presence of utensils associated with the dish in Cape households during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The original records are held in the Cape Town Archives Repository in the Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8: Inventories.

1. 1752 — Inventory of Beatrix Louw. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/8, inventory 1, dated 6 March 1752, Swellengrebel, p. 863. The inventory lists “1 cooper bobotijkeetel” (one copper bobotie kettle) among the cooking equipment in the kitchen.
2. 1802 — Inventory of Hendrik Justinus de Wet and Margaretha Jacoba Smuts. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/23, inventory 40, dated 9 June 1802, Cape Town, pp. 643, 645. The inventory lists sixteen and twenty-two white earthenware bobotie cups in the porcelain room, and a further twelve bobotie cups in the pantry, making fifty cups in total.
3. 1804 — Inventory of Jacob Pieter de Neys and Johanna Catharina Cruijwagen. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/24, inventory 29, dated 29 August 1804, Cape Town, p. 806. The inventory of the household’s glassware and tableware lists “zes en twintig blaauw porcelain bobotie potjes” (twenty-six blue porcelain bobotie pots).
4. 1816 — Inventory of Catharina Maria Blanckenberg. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/31, inventory 70, dated 28 October 1816, Cape Town, p. 171. The kitchen-attic inventory lists “een yzere boboti pan” (an iron boboti pan).
5. 1817 — Inventory of Elzabe Anthoinetta Jacoba la Febre, widow of Michiel Coenraad Gie. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/32, inventory 44a, dated 1, 2 and 4 August 1817, Cape Town, p. 333. The provision-room inventory lists “drie en dertig bobotie potjes” (thirty-three bobotie pots).
6. 1825 — Inventory of Frans Rynhard Bresler and Maria Elizabeth Brink. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/44, inventory 7, dated 5 April 1825, Cape Town, p. 527. The inventory records “sixteen boboty cups” in the second cellar.
7. 1827 — Inventory of Frederik Johannes Liebenberg and Anna Sophia Jooste. Cape Archives Repository, Master of the Orphan Chamber (MOOC), Series 8, MOOC 8/70, inventory 47b, dated 3 May 1827, Tulbagh, p. 1239. The pantry inventory lists “8 bobote bekertjes” (eight bobote cups).

Printed sources

• The Cape Monthly Magazine. 1870. “Life at the Cape,” by “A Lady.” An early printed occurrence of the word in the spelling “Babootie,” as identified by the Dictionary of South African English.
• Hewitt, A. G. 1890. Cape Cookery: Simple Yet Distinctive. Recipes include “Bobotee” and “Cup Bobotees.”
• Schreiner, Olive. 1883. The Story of an African Farm. Published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron; includes the expression “bobotie-meat.”
• Duckitt, Hildagonda J. 1891. Hilda’s “Where Is It?” of Recipes. London: Chapman and Hall. See “Bobotee,” identified as “My mother's Recipe.”
• Van Tulleken, S. H. 1923. The Practical Cookery Book for South Africa.
• Botha, Colin Graham. 1926. Social Life in the Cape Colony in the 18th Century. Cape Town: Juta. pp. 56–57.
• Leipoldt, C. Louis. 1933. Kos vir die Kenner.
• Gerber, Hilda. 1957. Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays. Includes a bobotie recipe attributed to Mrs A. Jacobs of Schotsche Kloof.
• Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles. “Bobotie, noun.” Dictionary Unit for South African English, Rhodes University. https://dsae.co.za/entry/bobotie/e00925