South African Cuisine - Beverages

Beverages

Beer has been an important beverage in South Africa for hundreds of years among indigenous people long before colonization and the arrival of Europeans with their own beer drinking traditions. Traditional beer was brewed from local grains, especially sorghum. Beer was so prized that it became central to many ceremonies, like betrothals and weddings, in which one family ceremoniously offered beer to the other family. Unlike European beer, South African traditional beer was unfiltered and cloudy and had a low alcohol content. Around the turn of the centuries, when white owned industry began studying malnutrition among urban workers, it was discovered that traditional beer provided crucial vitamins sometimes not available in the grain heavy traditional diet and even less available in urban industrial slums.

When South Africa's mines were developed and Black South Africans began to urbanize, women moved to the city also, and began to brew beer for the predominantly male labor force — a labor force that was mostly either single or who had left their wives back in the rural areas under the migrant labor system. That tradition of urban women making beer for the labor force persists in South Africa to the extent that informal bars and taverns (shebeens) are typically owned by women (shebeen queens). Today, most urban dwellers buy beer manufactured by industrial breweries that make beer that is like beer one would buy in Europe and America, but rural people and recent immigrants to the city still enjoy the cloudy, unfiltered traditional beer.

Compared to an American or southern or Korea or western European diet, milk and milk products are very prominent in the traditional Black South African diet. As cows were considered extremely desirable domestic animals in precolonial times, milk was abundant.In the absence of refrigeration, various kinds of soured milk, somewhat like yogurt, were a dietary mainstay. A visitor to any African village in the 1800s would have been offered a large calabash of cool fermented milk as a greeting. Because milk cows allowed women to wean their children early and become fertile more quickly, local cultures had a number of sayings connecting cattle, milk and population growth, such as the Sotho-Tswana saying, "cattle beget children." Today, in the dairy section of South Africa's supermarkets, one will find a variety of kinds of milk, sour milk, sour cream, and other modern versions of traditional milk products.