Southern Africa · Volume 21, The Most Layered Plate
Pap, three ways
Afrikaner, and then everywhere
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Pap is the plate rather than a side dish, and if it fails the meal fails. The ratios are Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen's, in volume measures using super maize meal.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 each. 30 to 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- 500 ml water, 5 ml salt, 190 ml maize meal, for slappap
- 500 ml water, 5 ml salt, 250 ml maize meal, for stywe pap
- 250 ml water, 5 ml salt, 500 ml maize meal, for krummelpap
Method
- For slappap and stywe pap: bring the salted water to the boil, slake the meal to a smooth paste with a little cold water, then stir that paste gradually into the boiling water.
- Cook 30 minutes at a bare simmer, stirring often for slappap and hard for stywe pap. Ten minutes gives you chalk.
- For krummelpap the method changes completely. Bring 600 ml water with 5 ml salt to a hard boil. Tip in 400 g maize meal in one go, without stirring, so it sits as a mound. Lid on, 5 minutes.
- Stir once, firmly, with a fork. Lid on, lowest heat, steam 30 minutes, forking through two or three times.
- Finish with a knob of butter and fork it through once more.
Notes
Umphokoqo is the same crumb, Xhosa, eaten cold with amasi poured over; uphuthu is the Zulu version. Make krummelpap well and you have made both.
What a modern chef changes
Grade chosen on purpose, hydration measured, and a second cook that turns pap into a plated element
Rungs 3, 1 and 4
Method
- Choose the grade before the ratio. Super maize meal, talc-fine and bright white, is for slappap and stywe pap. Coarse braai pap meal is what gives krummelpap its crumb. Using super meal for krummelpap is fighting the grind, and it is the variable British cooks never adjust because British shops rarely offer it.
- Weigh once, in grams per litre, and write it down. Maize meal packs differently by brand and by humidity, so converting the ratio you like into weight makes it repeatable in a way volume measures never quite are.
- Cook stywe pap 40 minutes, set it, slice it, and grill it over the coals. Retrogradation is already firming the gel as it cools; thirty minutes in a lined tray, cut into slabs, onto the medium zone until the surface blisters. It is the same starch physics as Rung 1's crust.
- Sour a quarter of the meal first. Slake it, leave it covered at room temperature 24 to 48 hours until it smells sharp and clean, then cook as above. Rung 4: you have made incwancwa, and against a fatty braai plate it does the work of a squeeze of lemon with none of the mismatch.