Kondre

As tradition built it

Serves 6. About 3 hours.

Ingredients

• 8 green, unripe plantains
• 1 kg goat, or beef
• 3 pebe seeds
• 10 djansang seeds
• 2 country onion rondelles
• 4 four corners, or cloves
• 5 white Penja peppercorns
• 1 tbsp mesep
• 4 tbsp crude red palm oil
• as listed 5 garlic cloves, 80 g ginger, 1 onion, 1 leek, 1 celery stalk, basil, tomato

Method

1. Green plantain only. Ripe plantain will not survive the cook time and produces a different and sweeter dish.
2. Toast the seeds before grinding them. Blend the fresh aromatics.
3. Cook the plantains 45 minutes first.
4. Add the meat and everything else and cook 60 minutes more.

Notes

After La Vie Bami, a Bamileke kitchen.

Note the sequence, which is the reverse of ordinary stew logic. The plantain sheds starch into the liquor for three quarters of an hour before any meat protein arrives to compete for water, and that is where kondre's glossy body comes from.

What a modern chef changes

Three seeds treated as three tools, and the sulphur held to the end

Rungs 4 and 5

Method

1. Toast the seeds separately and to different colours. Rung 4. Pebe wants a light toast to make the kernel grindable. Djansang wants 3 to 5 minutes and no further, because it is half oil and burns to bitterness. Four corners sharpens with a harder roast. One pan, one timer and one colour for all three is three compromises.
2. Keep the country onion out of the 105 minute cook entirely. Rung 5. Two rondelles grated in during the last two minutes will do more than four at the start. Grind the Penja at the table for the same reason.
3. Reduce the liquor separately if it is thin. Lift the plantain and meat out, reduce hard for five minutes, return them. Reducing with the plantain in the pot turns it to pulp.