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Side · In Afrikaans: Koperpennie-slaai

Copper penny salad

Carrots cut into rings with pepper and onion, drowned in a hot sweet-sour tomato sauce and left overnight. The name comes from the shape of the slices.

Whether the salad comes from the American South or from South Africa is disputed. It spread through the English-speaking world from South Africa, where it has been on cold buffets for decades.

Prep
20 min
On the fire
15 min
Serves
8
Effort
easy
Sliced carrots with pepper and onion, before the hot dressing goes over them
NatalieMaynor · CC BY 2.0

When it goes on

Done beforehand

Made in the kitchen. On the table before you light up.

Equipment: nothing

This line

British period1806 to 1961

Chutneys, marinades, side salads — and the word chop.

Method

  1. Fry the vegetables

    Heat the oil in a wide pan and stir-fry the carrot rings for about ten minutes. Add onion and pepper for the last five. Everything should be tender but still crisp — the salad lives on resistance.

  2. Move them over

    Tip into a bowl that can take hot sauce.

  3. Boil the sauce

    Bring passata, vinegar, sugar, mustard, Worcestershire, salt and pepper to the boil and let it bubble for two minutes. Stir in the slaked cornflour and boil for a further minute until it thickens slightly.

  4. Pour it over hot

    Pour the boiling sauce over the warm vegetables and mix. Bringing both together hot is the point — cold, the sauce never gets into the carrots.

  5. Overnight

    Cool, cover and refrigerate for at least twelve hours; twenty-four is better. Before that it tastes of vinegar; afterwards it tastes of salad.

Tips

  • It keeps a week in the fridge and improves every day. It is the one side on this site you can genuinely prepare well ahead.
  • Without cornflour, reduce the sauce for five minutes longer. Same result, a little darker.
  • Traditionally it is made with a tin of tomato soup. Passata with sugar and mustard comes very close and is available anywhere.

The name is half the description: carrots cut into rings look like copper pennies, and that is how they sit in the bowl. That this became one of South Africa's longest-lived salads is down to the sauce.

It is sweet-sour, lightly thickened, and poured hot over warm vegetables. That way it soaks in instead of sitting on top — and it is why the salad is markedly better on day two than on day one.

And it keeps. A week in the fridge is not a guess but the usual experience; sugar and vinegar work as a mild preservative.

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