Central Africa · Volume 07, The Hinge of the Continent
Eru with waterleaf
Manyu and the anglophone Southwest
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 15
- Researched
- Researched from 90 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
Gnetum africanum, shredded hair-fine, cooked with waterleaf, palm oil and a stack of smoked and dried proteins, and served with garri or water fufu. Across the Nigerian border it is afang. Eru's identity is textural before it is anything else. It is a gymnosperm rather than a leafy vegetable, the leaf is tough and almost leathery, and cooked properly it has a chewy, almost noodle-like resistance that nothing in a British supermarket has.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour 15.
Ingredients
- 115 g dried eru, about 4 oz, shredded hair-fine
- 900 g waterleaf, about 2 lb, or spinach
- 500 ml crude red palm oil, about 2 cups
- 225 g beef
- ½ smoked fish
- 225 g cooked tripe
- 225 g cooked cow skin
- 100 g dried crayfish, about 1 cup
- 2 habaneros
- to taste salt, bouillon
Method
- Cook the beef, tripe and cow skin until tender, keeping the liquor.
- Shred the eru as finely as you possibly can.
- Eru does not need much water. The waterleaf supplies it. Start the eru with the waterleaf and only a little liquor, and let the succulent collapse and release.
- Do not cover the pot. Covered, the greens go drab and olive.
- When the eru has softened, add the palm oil, the smoked fish, the dried crayfish, the habaneros and the proteins and cook until the oil melts into the pot rather than sitting on it.
- Season, and serve with garri or water fufu.
Notes
After Keng's Kitchen.
What a modern chef changes
Alkali used for colour rather than habit, oil added late, and the sulphur register kept alive
Rungs 2, 1 and 5
Method
- Use a very small quantity of alkali, and use it for the right reason. Rung 2. A pea-sized piece of kanwa, dissolved, settled and decanted, added early, does two jobs here: it softens the leathery eru by hydrolysing pectin, and alkaline pH stabilises chlorophyll against the acid-driven conversion to olive-brown pheophytin, so the greens stay green. Overdo it and the same pectin hydrolysis that tenderised the meat destroys the cell walls of the leaf and it goes slimy.
- Add the palm oil in two stages. Rung 1. Half when the eru softens, half stirred in off the heat at the end. The second lot delivers the colour and fruit aroma that thirty minutes of simmering would have taken out.
- Toast the crayfish and add half of it at the end. Rungs 6 and 5 together: ground fresh, half early for depth and half at the last minute for lift.
- Use spinach for the waterleaf and say so. Waterleaf is hard to buy in Britain and spinach does the same job of adding moisture. It is right for eru and wrong for ndole, because here it replaces a moisture source and there it would replace the bitterness that holds the dish up.