West Africa · Volume 06, The Atlantic Islands
Caldo de chabéu
Guinea-Bissau
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- Researched from 115 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
You do not add oil. You boil the whole palm fruit until the mesocarp softens and lets go of the nut, then pound and strain to get a thick orange-red liquor carrying the oil and the fruit solids in suspension. That suspension is the sauce and the thickener at once. If you cooked sauce graine in Volume Four or abenkwan in Volume Three, you know the engineering. The interesting part is not that it is shared. It is that Cape Verde, five hundred miles north and inside the same empire, does not have it at all.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour 30.
Ingredients
- 500 g chabéu (palm fruit)
- 1 L water
- 1 to 2 sukulbebem (fresh chilli)
- 400 g mandioca (cassava), peeled and cut
- 6 djagatu sinho, halved
- 800 g catfish, or meat, or frango da terra
- to taste salt, and hot white rice to serve
Method
- Boil the chabéu in the water until the pits separate from the pulp.
- Strain and mash the pulp. Add cold water, then sieve.
- Simmer down until it forms a thick red broth.
- Separately boil the protein with its seasonings.
- Combine, add the cassava, djagatu and the sukulbebem, and cook until tender.
- Serve with hot rice. A secondary sauce of fish, onion, lemon, tomato, broth and chilli is served alongside.
Notes
After the Slow Food Foundation's Guiné-Bissau da terra à mesa.
If you cannot buy palm fruit, tinned palm nut concentrate is the working substitute, and it is not the same thing: it has already been cooked once and lost aroma to that cooking.
What a modern chef changes
A double extraction, and the oil layer treated as a decision
Rungs 2, 3 and 6
Method
- Extract twice and keep the extractions separate. The first press gives the richest, most aromatic liquor. Return the pressed pulp to fresh water at 70°C for 20 minutes and press again. Reduce that second extraction hard and cook in it; add the first extraction in the last ten minutes. Rung 2 logic applied to palm fruit rather than palm oil.
- Build on smoked fish stock instead of water. Rung 3. The catfish gives fresh fish flavour; the stock gives depth fresh fish alone cannot.
- Decide about the oil layer instead of letting the pot decide. When a red-orange oil layer stands clear on the surface, that is a readiness signal, not an instruction to keep boiling. Either serve then, or skim the oil, hold base and oil separately, and flood the surface at the pass. From the moment you skim, no more carotene is being destroyed.