Little has been written about the Tswana culinary heritage. However food fundi’s can now experiment with traditional mouth-watering dishes guided by a recipe book, published with the help of 129 Tswana women in the North West.
Tswana dishes are mostly green, white and brown, colours of food sources in the Bushveld environment. However it surely does not taste dull and now everyone can join in the feast.
The Tswana cookbook is the brainchild of a North West researcher, tracing the link between traditional food and health. “ I have been watching the TV show ‘Come Dine With Me’ for quite some time and when I came to South Africa, I was a little bit disappointed that there was a lot of presentation of French cuisine, and Italian cuisine and I felt the diversity of the culinary richness in this country was not represented,” says North West University’s Africa Unit for Transdisciplinary Health Research’s Dr Nicole Classen.
She asked Tswana women in the Vaalharts region to prepare their favourite starch, vegetable and meat dishes. Twenty five recipes were chosen for ‘A Taste of Vaalharts’. “It’s really amazing the response we are getting, from all the cultures especially the Tswana women, because they didn’t think for once that people could publish a book of their Tswana cuisine,” says Co-author of A Taste of Vaalharts, Mildred Thomas.
Fast and refined foods can lead to diabetes and obesity. It is hoped that the book will send cooks in a healthier direction.
“There’s three points that strongly encourages this traditional cooking. Firstly if you cook yourself, you know exactly what you put into your food and then you don’t have to be an expert to read a food label and decipher for yourself how much sodium, salts or fat there is in it. So you know exactly what’s in it. Secondly, our genetic make-up doesn’t change, but our diets changed, but in the wrong direction. So, we are exposed to a lot of preservatives, and chemicals and over-processed foods and then we do not react well to it. That’s where our diseases come in, allergies, cardio-vascular disease. Thirdly, it’s all about sustainability. There’s a reason why some food is traditional to a group of people staying somewhere,” says North West University’s Dietician Mari De Koker.
The recipes are in Tswana and English. The book can be downloaded for free, from the university’s webpage.
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