Palm butter soup

As tradition built it

Serves 6. About 2 hours 30 in total: about 1 hour for extraction (boiling and pounding the palm nuts), plus 1 hour 30 for the soup.

Ingredients

• 1 kg fresh palm fruit
• 500 g mixed meat and dried fish
• 1 onion
• to taste chilli
• 200 g okra

Method

1. Boil the palm nuts, about 45 minutes or more, until soft.
2. Drain, and pound in a mortar for about 15 minutes, carefully, without cracking the hard inner kernel, to break down the fibrous husk and soften the pulp.
3. Add water back to the pounded mash and press or squeeze through a sieve or muslin, twisting gently, to extract the thick orange liquid, the palm butter proper, discarding the fibre and hard kernels.
4. Simmer this palm butter as the base of a soup with the meat, dried fish, onion, chilli and okra, thickened further as it reduces.

What a modern chef changes

The single most common home error named and avoided

Rung 2

Method

1. Twist the muslin gently, never squeeze it hard. Rung 2: aggressive squeezing forces bitter, fibre-bound compounds from the kernel's outer coat through the mesh along with the fat, and there is no way to correct a batch once this has happened. This single instruction is worth more than any other in this recipe.
2. Keep the kernel intact while pounding. Cracking it releases bitterness the sieving step cannot remove afterwards.