BRAAI vs BBQ ~ the South African way

It’s the first public holiday after winter, you’ve got a long weekend to take it all in, and the coals are getting fired up to high heaven.

Heritage Day really is one of SA’s more popular public holidays.

An the traditional BRAAI takes centre stage

So where did the word BRAAI come from???????

The rest of the English-speaking world refers to the process of cooking meat on an open grill as a ‘barbecue’.

Colloquial terms, like ‘BBQ’ and ‘barbie’ are also wide-ranging. But the word BRAAI?

It is distinctly & very exclusively South African.

If the spirit of Heritage Day is to celebrate our history and our culture, then surely, it makes sense to learn how our part of the world ended up with its own unique term, for a rather universal practice…

It doesn’t take a stable genius to conclude that we get the phrase from the Dutch language, given South Africa’s long, colonial past. However, the word we picked up from the settlers was actually ‘braden’ –?the literal meaning of which translates to ‘grill’ or ‘roast’. We didn’t just start out with the word ‘braai’.

As our languages developed over decades and centuries, the evolution of our own languages started to have an influence. Given that a certain type of food was always used for the ‘braden’, the word ‘vleis’ – which is Afrikaans for ‘meat’ – cropped up frequently, in relation to cooking food with the use of an open flame.

Over time,?‘braden vleis’ merged into a shorter word, eventually emerging as ‘braai’.

Happy BRAAI day!