Traditional meals like the national dish of salted beef stewed with maize and cabbage, grain-based items such as dumplings and deep-fried dough balls, vegetables like beans and wild spinach, and meat dishes made from goat, sheep and cow organs introduce what to expect from Botswanan cuisine. Botswana tour operators offer the full experience of the East African nation, ensuring you eat enough local delicacies to fuel your action-packed holiday in the land of rooibos tea, caterpillar worms and Lerotse melons.
National Dish:
Seswaa/Chotlho – salted stewed beef (with maize and cabbage)
Cereals:
Bogobe maize/sorghum porridge
Pap cornmeal
Samp dried corn kernels
Matemekwane dumplings, Magwinya deep fried dough balls (fat cakes)
Vegetables:
Beans: Morama (underground tuber), cow peas, ditloo (jugo beans) and letlhodi (china beans), dried bean leaves
Morogo (wild spinach)
Carrots, cabbage, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and lettuce
Groundnuts/Peanuts
Meat:
Beef, Goat, Chicken, Lamb
Serobe – organs of goat, sheep or cow (and trotters), Oxtail
Mopane caterpillar worms
River Fish
Dessert:
Kalahari truffle
Lemon and Condensed Milk Biscuits
Fruit:
Watermelon, Lerotse and Lekatane Melons, Marula
Beverages:
Rooiboos ‘bush’ tea
Madila (sour milk)
Homemade ginger beer
Beer:
Castle, Lion
Bojalwa ja Setswana (The Beer of Botswana) fermented sorghum homemade Chibuku Shake Shake (brewed from sorghum and corn in a milk carton)
Kgadi (from distilled sugar or fungus)
Spirits:
Tho-tho-tho (very strong, distilled)
Palm wine
Courtney Gahan is a serial expat, traveller and freelance writer who has bartered with Moroccan marketeers, seen the sun rise at Angkor Wat and elbowed her way through crowds on NYE in NYC
