Pan-African Cuisine
One range of food that is becoming more and more popular these days is Pan-African Cuisine. As the name implies, pan-African cuisine literally means cuisine from the whole of Africa, and so covers an extremely wide range of different dishes starting with Algerian food and ending with Zimbabwean food. Now that more and more foreign tourists are coming to South Africa, the demand for pan-African cuisine has gone up, and you are likely to find at least one dish originating in Africa on the menu of any restaurant that you visit.
On hearing the phrase pan-African Cuisine many people conjure up visions of a rather overweight man standing over a braai and turning the boerwors – that is just one tiny aspect of African cooking and is in no way representative of Africa as a whole. The dishes that you will find are more likely to be grilled fillets of springbok, kudu or ostrich. One of South Africa’s catering colleges actually has its own boma and students there are introduced to pan-African cooking as part of their two-year long chef’s course. The Prue Leith College of Food and Wine is situated in a quiet part of Hennopspark, a suburb of Centurion. Centurion is situated about halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Students are accepted into the college after they have reached the age of eighteen and have passed their Matric exam, and then only if they have attended an interview and completed a comprehensive questionnaire. The Diploma Course, which lasts for eighteen months, is split up into three semesters of six-months each. Huge emphasis is put on the hands-on aspect of catering – not just in the kitchen classroom, but in actual work conditions. In order to graduate students must complete the Cape Wine Academy Certificate Course during their second semester. During this course within-a-course students learn about the marriage of food and wine, with particular emphasis being placed on the wines of South Africa. At the very end of their course all students spend six months at a well-known catering establishment – this could be a game lodge, an hotel or a restaurant. Although most venues are dotted about over all of South Africa, there is every chance that a student could find him/herself overseas in Ireland, the United Kingdom or maybe even in Dubai.
But this is not the only place that students gain valuably hands-on experience. From as early as week two of the Diploma Course, students are spending several nights a week working in Prue Leith’s, the college’s very own restaurant that is set in the college grounds. Here they will be putting their pan-African cuisine classes to good use and can be seen taking orders at table, preparing and cooking meals in the kitchen, and serving the meals at table. The curriculum of the Prue Leith Diploma course is extremely comprehensive, and of course includes not just pan-African cuisine. The college also runs regular short courses and team building exercises under the direction of various qualified chefs.
