Tomato Bredie

Building the bredie
in the slow cooker

My exposure to tomato bredie came after I chose the 1999 Man Booker Prize for Fiction winner, Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee for bookclub. I googled South African cuisines to help develop the theme for the bookclub meal.

In my search, I found this: the Congo Cookbook, a collection of African recipes, which features excerpts from historic texts and rare recipes. One fine highlight was passages from Recipes: African Cooking (Foods of the World), a companion volume to Foods of the World: African Cooking by Laurens van der Post.

Van der Post mused on one of the South African dishes that come from the Cape Malay, bredie:

"Almost every country in the Western world has its meat stew. The Irish, of course, have Irish stew; the English, Lancashire hotpot; the Dutch, hutspot; the Germans, Eintopf; and the Hungarians, goulash. But only in South Africa is the dish of Oriental origin. The very word bredie is significant: it is a Malagasy word from Madagascar, and between the east coast of Madagascar and the world of India and Malaya there has been a steady coming and going since recorded history began. To this day, the bredies are a culinary reminder of that traffic."

Pretend it's lamb

Traditional bredies start with browning sliced onions; then laying mutton chunks for braising; adding the chosen vegetable, which lends its name to the bredie; and slow coking the dish with sweet spices – like cloves and cinnamon – garlic, and chiles. The quintessential bredie is the tomato bredie. The rich stew is full of umami and sweet, that gets a flavor sting of heat from the chiles and spices.

Tomato Bredie, adapted from Laurens van der Post's recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 large onion, peeled and sliced into 1/8 inch thick slices
• 1½ lbs. of boneless shoulder lamb (or beef), cut into 1-by-2-inch chunks
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tsp hot chile powder (like a hot paprika or West African chile powder)
• ½ Tbsp sugar
• ½ Tbsp salt
• 3 medium tomatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/8 inch thick slices
• 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes, crushed by hand
• 2 whole cloves

The addition of the tomatoes,
this bredie's namesake

Directions:

1. Lay the bottom of the slow cooker with the onion rings and then top the onions with the lamb.
2. Top the lamb with garlic, chile powder, sugar and salt, then place the tomato slices over the meat and top the meat and tomatoes with the can of tomatoes.
3. Add the cloves and cover and cook on low for 7 to 9 hours (or high for 4 to 5 hours), until the stew is rich and thick.
4. Serve with a side of rice, if desired.

The finished product - oh so yummy!