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,
owned the pots used to prepare it, and expected others to recognise the name, for
centuries. 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.
In 1802, the household of
Hendrik Justinus de Wet and Margaretha Jacoba Smuts, whose house stood on the
Heerengracht in Cape Town, contained several groups of white earthenware
bobotie cups. The quantities recorded were substantial: sixteen, twenty-two and
another twelve cups.
Two years later, the household
of Jacob Pieter de Neys and his wife, Johanna Catharina Cruywagen, included twenty-six
blue porcelain bobotie pots.
Other inventories continue the
trail. In 1816, Catharina Maria Blanckenberg, widow of Christoffel Brand, had
an iron boboti pan. In 1817, Elzabe Anthoinetta Jacoba la Febre, widow of
Michiel Coenraad Gie, had thirty-three bobotie pots. In 1825, the household of
Frans Rynhard Bresler and Maria Elizabeth Brink included sixteen boboty cups.
By 1827, Frederik Johannes Liebenberg and Anna Sophia Jooste had eight bobote
cups. The spelling 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 some unusual experiment. 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. Hilda follows this
with a recipe showing how they could be used. The inventories tell us that
bobotie cups existed. Hewitt gives us a method for cooking bobotie in them.
Duckitt gives us her own description of the practice. It is a useful connection
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. The Dictionary of South African English
records an English occurrence in 1870. The Cape Monthly Magazine
referred to a form of the word alongside other familiar foods, “Babootie’ and
‘frickadel’ and ‘potato-pie’. The reference continues with the observation that
“these are great improvements upon the minced meats of England.”
Then 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 understand.
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. In 1900, the Graaff-Reinet
Budget referred to “boebootis”. Dorothea Fairbridge's Piet of Italy,
published in 1913, mentions bobotie and rice. By 1927, C. G. Botha was
including bobotie among foods associated with South African life. 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.
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| Dried Tamarind |
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 fromMrs 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.
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| Portraits of Louis Leipoldt and Hildagonda Duckitt in the Towerwater dining room |
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.
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| Tamarind Water |
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 1752 inventory gives us a copper bobotie kettle. The early nineteenth-century records give us pots, pans and individual cups. Hewitt shows us how to prepare cup bobotees. Duckitt gives us her mother's recipe and calls the cups the old Indian way. Schreiner uses bobotie meat in a novel without needing to explain the reference. Leipoldt later preserves tamarind as an alternative to vinegar. Each source tells us something different. None gives us the complete story, but together they show how firmly bobotie had taken root in Cape life.
That is why I chose Duckitt's
recipe. I wanted to cook something that connected the food on my table with the
records I had been reading. The tamarind came from her instructions. The cups
connected her method with the older household inventories. The almonds, bread
and egg topping belonged to a pattern that appears repeatedly in the early
recipes. I wasn't looking for the one true bobotie. I wanted to understand one
version of it and see what happened when I made it.
For me, that is what makes old
recipes worth investigating. They are not just lists of ingredients. They can
lead us back to kitchens, households and people whose lives are otherwise known
to us only through scraps of documentary evidence. Bobotie has left behind a
particularly good trail: a copper pot, porcelain vessels, little cups, printed
recipes and references in novels and newspapers. And it is still on our tables.
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| Yellow rice with raisins the classic accompaniment with bobotie |
That, to me, is a good reason to
cook Hildagonda Duckitt's bobotee. Not because it is the only authentic
version, but because it is one documented part of the Cape's culinary history,
preserved in a family recipe and carried into print. A little tamarind, a few
almonds, some rice and a bobotie baked in a cup. It is a simple meal, but there
is a long history behind it. And that is the history I wanted to bring back to
the table.
A final
note on the evidence
The date of
1752 should be described as the earliest surviving documentary evidence I have
found, rather than the definitive first appearance of bobotie. The inventory
records a bobotie kettle, not a recipe, and the distinction matters.
The later
inventories establish the presence of bobotie pots and cups in Cape households.
The printed recipes show ways of preparing the dish, while the literary
references demonstrate that the word had become familiar. Taken together, these
sources give us a history of bobotie at the Cape without requiring us to claim
a single, settled origin or one original recipe.
For me,
that is enough. The records show that bobotie had a place in Cape kitchens long
before it became a familiar emblem of South African cooking. Duckitt's recipe
gave me a way to explore that history for myself, one little cup at a time.
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.
- 1752 — Beatrix Louw, widow of Johannes
Needer. MOOC 8/8, inventory no. 1. The inventory includes the entry “1
cooper bobotijkeetel” (one copper bobotie kettle).
- 1802 — Hendrik Justinus
de Wet and Margaretha Jacoba Smuts. MOOC 8/23, inventory no. 40 1/2. The
inventory lists white earthenware bobotie cups and other small cups.
- 1804 — Jacob Pieter de
Neys and Johanna Catharina Cruywagen. MOOC 8/24, inventory no. 29. The
inventory records 26 blue porcelain bobotie pots.
- 1816 — Catharina Maria
Blanckenberg,
widow of Christoffel Brand. MOOC Series 8/31, inventory 70. The inventory
lists an iron bobotie pan.
- 1817 — Elzabe
Anthoinetta Jacoba la Febre, widow of Michiel Coenraad Gie. MOOC
Series 8/32, inventory no.44a. The inventory lists 33 bobotie pots.
- 1825 — Frans Rynhard
Bresler and Maria Elizabeth Brink. MOOC 8/44, inventory no. 7. The
inventory records sixteen boboty cups.
- 1827 — Frederik
Johannis Liebenberg and Anna Sophia Jooste. MOOC Series 8/70,
inventory no47b. The inventory lists 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.
- 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.
