A lot of earlier recipes contain
ingredients that are no longer readily available. The same goes for “outydse
soetkoekie met rooi bolus” or traditional spicy cookies with red bole. A direct
translation of the name of the cookies to sweet cookies from the Afrikaans
soetkoekies is also not correct. The cookies in question are more spicy than
sweet. 
When we started exploring the recipes for “outydse
soetkoekies”, we found several variations of the recipe. Some had red bole (an
iron oxide), some claret or brandy.
The recipes using the “rooi bolus”
interested me because of the ingredient. I remember the two-tone cookies with
the almond in the middle, but I cannot recall if the reddish part had a
different flavour from the rest of the cookie.
It is clear from the earlier recipes that
people knew from experience how to incorporate the “rooi bolus”. The recipes merely
list it as an ingredient. There are no clear instructions to keep it separate
for use in some of the dough that will later be incorporated in the remaining
dough to create the familiar red colour patterns.
The plain dough on the left and the dough with the "rooi bolus" on the right
How the dough with the “rooi bolus”
colouring was incorporated into the cookies, is another matter. Some people
make random patterns with it. Others make dots on the dough, and some make the two-tone
cookies with the almond in the middle.
 |
| The dough with the "rooi bolus" |
What is “rooi bolus”, and why was it used
in the recipe?
On Wikipedia I found the following
information:
“Bolus is an earth pigment that occurs in
nature in different colours; it can be white, yellow, red or gray. Such earth
pigments are composed of clay, alumina and hydrous aluminum silicates.
The red bolus (bolus rubra) was mostly
imported from Armenia and was therefore given the designation bolus armenicus,
bolus armena, lutum armenum, terra armenum, etc. The coloring component is iron
oxide (red ochre, Fe ₂ O ₃), which can be up to 20%. In addition, it mainly contains clay
minerals.”
I decided to look at the definition for red
bole which seems to be the accepted translation for “rooi bolus”. I found the
following definition for bole on Wikipedia:
“Bole is a shade of reddish brown. The
color term derives from Latin bōlus (or dirt) and refers to a kind of soft fine
clay whose reddish-brown varieties are used as pigments, and as a coating in
panel paintings and frames underneath the paint or gold leaf. Under gold leaf,
it "warms" the colour, which can otherwise have a greenish shade.
However, bole in art is a good deal more red and less brown than the modern
shade; it is often called Armenian bole.
Another name for the color bole is terra
rosa. The color name terra rosa has been used as a synonym for bole since 1753.
The color terra rosa is classified a warm red color. In art, it's classified as
being similar to Venetian red, but more pink or salmon. In French, it
corresponds to the color châtaigne.
Bole is one of the oldest color names in
English. The first recorded use of bole as a color name in English was in the
year 1386.”
From the above information, it is clear
that red bole or “rooi bolus” is a very old colouring ingredient and basically
it was a red clay used for colouring paint pigments and sometimes food. Today
it is still used to colour red toffee apples, Essies (another cookie of Cape
Malay origin) and “Soetkoekies”.
I thought of using a readily available red
food colouring when making the “soetkoekies”. After I ordered the colouring
online I happened to come across a few cubes of Reckitt’s blue that I bought
some time ago from the General Dealer up the road from us in Woodstock.
Coronation Bazaar is one of those rare stores that seems to be caught in a time
capsule. A general dealer in the true sense of the word. They stock everything
from hardware, books, groceries, etc. Sometimes one will find a product that
has not been seen for years.
With my container of red bole in hand, I
was ready to bake traditional “Outydse soetkoekies”. After looking at several
recipes, I decided to make the recipe in The South African Culinary Tradition
by Renata Coetzee, published in 1977.
Soetkoekies
500 g Cake flour
2 ml (half teaspoon) salt
2 ml (half teaspoon) ground cloves
10 ml (2 teaspoons) ground cinnamon
5 ml (1 teaspoon) ground ginger
5 ml (1 teaspoon) bicarbonate of soda
300 g (1,5 cups) sugar
200 g (0,8 cup) butter
5 ml (1 teaspoon) red bolus (ferri-oxide mixture)
1 egg
25 ml (2 tablespoons) wine
Sift dry ingredients together and rub in
butter.
Beat egg and wine together. Combine ingredients and mix into a stiff dough.
Leave to stand overnight. Take a piece of dough and work red bolus into it.
Roll out the remaining dough to a thickness of 5mm. Arrange strips of red bolus
dough on rolled out dough and roll out again, to a thickness of 5mm. Cut out
rounds of dough with a glass about 50mm in diameter. Bake in hot oven (200°C) for 10 minutes.
I decided to decorate them with a blanched
almond each. To blanch almonds: bring a pot of water to the boil. Put in the
almonds and boil for 1 minute only. Drain and rinse them in cold water to stop
them from cooking. The peels will rub off very easily.
After 10 minutes, I could marvel at the
trays of childhood memories coming out of the oven. Tasting the cookies I
realised that the red bolus was strictly for decorative purposes and had no
impact on the flavour.
