Central Africa · Volume 07, The Hinge of the Continent
Ndole
Duala and the Sawa coast
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
The national dish claim needs handling honestly. No source consulted gives a date, a mechanism or an official designation, and attribution wobbles between the Sawa broadly and the Duala specifically. This chapter says widely called the national dish and leaves it there.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour 15.
Ingredients
- 450 g bitter leaf, washed to target (see method)
- 450 g raw blanched peanuts, about 3 cups
- 1 kg beef, chunked
- 7 to 10 prawns
- 60 g dried crayfish, about ¼ cup
- 250 to 500 ml vegetable oil
- 250 to 500 ml beef broth or water
- 1 onion, 2 scotch bonnets, 1 tbsp ginger and garlic paste
- to taste salt, bouillon
Method
- De-bitter the leaf. Rub the leaves vigorously between your palms with water and a little salt, then rinse and squeeze hard. Two to three cycles, with a hard squeeze between each.
- Boil the blanched peanuts 15 to 20 minutes, then blend them smooth using their own cooking water or the broth.
- Sauté the onion, add the peanut purée, season, add the broth, and boil 10 minutes or more.
- Add the crayfish and the beef.
- Fold in the bitter leaves with a cup of the oil and boil only 2 minutes, covered.
- Fry the prawns separately and put them on top.
Notes
After Cooking With Claudy.
Serve with plantain, bobolo, miondo, yam or rice.
Two things make this Cameroonian rather than generically West African. The peanuts are boiled, not roasted, before blending, which keeps the paste pale and creamy rather than dark and toasty. And the leaf goes in last and barely cooks: two minutes. This is a nut sauce with a green folded through it, not a stewed green.
What a modern chef changes
Bitterness on a dial, the liaison built properly, and a finishing oil at the pass
Rungs 3, 6 and 5
Method
- Wash the leaf in graded batches. Rung 3. Split the 450 g in two, wash one lot three times and one lot once, cook with the three-wash lot and blend the one-wash lot in to a target at the end. You now have a dial where everybody else has a hope, and since no source publishes a wash count, this is the only honest way to work.
- Build the groundnut as a liaison, not a stir-in. Boil the nuts in their own water, then blend with the cooking liquid plus onion and garlic.
- Build the umami stack before you reach for a cube. Rung 6. Dry toast the crayfish 3 minutes before grinding. Use a real meat broth, correct with a little plain MSG, salt last.
- Finish with a fried prawn and onion oil poured over at the pass. Nothing aromatic should have to survive an hour in the pot if you can add it in the last thirty seconds instead.