South African Spices: Peri-Peri, Durban Masala, Cape Malay Curry and Bobotie Seasonings

South African spice cooking pulls from several directions at once: fiery peri-peri, the hot, reddish curries of Durban’s Indian community, and the mild, sweet-spiced dishes of the Cape Malay kitchen, with bobotie the best known. Each comes with its own small surprises. One food writer says to buy Durban masala from a KwaZulu-Natal spice merchant, not in a box, and another calls bay leaves “a poor substitute” for the lemon leaves she lays on top of bobotie.

At a glance

Peri-peri

The Dictionary of South African English defines peri-peri (also piri-piri) as a hot sauce of red chiles, peppers and lemon juice, a seasoning of powdered red chiles, or any dish made with it. Its earliest dated quotation is from 1959. It calls the word’s origin obscure: maybe Swahili pilipili, maybe Mozambican Portuguese, with a possible Arabic root behind both.²

Which chile the name means is looser than recipes suggest. “Bird’s eye” gets applied to almost any small, pointed, very hot chile, and Katzer writes that in Portugal and its former East African colonies the name peri peri goes to a bell-shaped type of Capsicum baccatum.³ DeWitt’s heat scale lists “African birdseye” chiles at 100,000 to 500,000 SHU, as a category, not a measured sample.⁴

Dry peri-peri seasonings in shops vary by brand, and we found no standard formula. See cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes and Portuguese spices.

Durban curry and Durban masala

Durban’s curries come from the city’s Indian community. South African History Online records that nearly 152,184 indentured laborers arrived in Natal from across India between 1860 and 1911, followed by “free” Indians who came mainly as traders, and that Durban has the largest Indian population in sub-Saharan Africa.⁵ The community still speaks languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati.

Food writer Tony Jackman describes Durban curry as hot and reddish brown, with the color coming from tomato as well as chiles and spices. Part of the heat comes from Durban masala. He recommends buying it from a KwaZulu-Natal spice merchant instead of in a commercial box, and names its core spices as cinnamon, cumin and fennel. His own recipe adds whole cinnamon, cardamom, star anise, bay leaves, curry leaves, fenugreek and black mustard seed, ground turmeric, fennel, cinnamon, coriander and cumin, and chile in three forms: chili powder, fresh chiles and masala.¹

See curry powder, is curry powder spicy?, curry leaves and Madras curry powder.

Cape Malay curry and bobotie

Bobotie is gentler. In her recipe, South African food writer Jeanne Horak uses a teaspoon of curry powder and says the dish is meant to taste mildly curried. It also has ginger, garlic, apricot jam, dried apricots, raisins and almonds, and she serves it with turmeric-yellow rice. She points to the curry spicing, the yellow rice and the fruit in a meat dish as signs of its Malay roots, while noting that where the name comes from is unclear.⁶

Lemon leaves or bay leaves? Horak lays six lemon leaves on top of the bobotie and calls three bay leaves “a poor substitute,” suggesting a little grated lemon rind with them.⁶ That’s one cook’s view, but it flips the usual assumption that bay is the standard and lemon leaf the alternative.

See bay leaves, turmeric and curry spices.

Braai seasonings

Braai (barbecue) salts and spice rubs are sold as house blends. We found no published standard or named recipe to compare, so we can’t tell you what a “typical” braai salt contains. See BBQ spices, coriander and mustard powder.

Related pages

• Portuguese spices, Indian spices and Nigerian spices
• Cumin, fennel seed and cinnamon
• The master list of herbs and spices