Central Africa · Volume 07, The Hinge of the Continent

Poulet DG

Name: Poulet DG
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Cameroon
Ingredients: 1 chicken, jointed into 8; 4 ripe plantains, cut into thick fingers; 2 carrots, batonned; 150 g green beans, topped; 1 sweet pepper, sliced; 2 tomatoes, 1 onion, 4 garlic cloves, 30 g ginger; to taste neutral oil for frying, salt, bouillon, chilli

Douala and Yaoundé

Poulet DG: Browned fried chicken joints tumbled with thick fingers of deep gold fried ripe plantain, carrot batons, green beans still bright and strips of sweet pepper.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour

Researched: Researched from 90 sources in the brief

Fried chicken with fried ripe plantain, carrot, green bean, sweet pepper and aromatics. DG is directeur général, and every francophone source repeats that the dish was originally reserved for people of a certain social importance and has since been completely democratised. And that is where the story stops. No source consulted names an inventor, a restaurant, a city or a year, and widely repeated dates such as "Yaoundé in the 1980s" appear to be unsourced. See the final section. The argument it makes is worth stating. Every other dish here is a regional grammar with a several-hundred-year foundation and this one has none. It is what happens when a Cameroonian kitchen acquires a large pan, imported vegetables, refrigeration and a middle class, and it became national faster than any dish that carries a lineage. A cuisine that cannot produce a new dish is a museum.

by Douala and Yaoundé

After 1916 the territory is split between a French mandate and a British one administered from Nigeria, and the canon still carries the line. The anglophone Northwest and Southwest give you achu, eru, ekwang, kwacoco, njama njama, garri, water fufu, kati kati, and a Cross River-facing vocabulary shared with Calabar. The francophone Littoral, Centre, West and North give you ndole, mbongo tchobi, sanga, nkui, kondre, poulet DG, folere, brochettes, and a forest spice vocabulary shared with Gabon and Congo. Any account that treats Cameroon as one cuisine misses that the dish names themselves carry the partition, and this is not a settled historical curiosity: the anglophone question is a live and violent political matter, handled below as fact rather than as flavour.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

1 chicken, jointed into 8
4 ripe plantains, cut into thick fingers
2 carrots, batonned
150 g green beans, topped
1 sweet pepper, sliced
2 tomatoes, 1 onion, 4 garlic cloves, 30 g ginger
to taste neutral oil for frying, salt, bouillon, chilli

Method

Season and fry the chicken pieces until browned and cooked through. Lift out.
Fry the plantain fingers to deep gold. Lift out and drain.
Sweat the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli, add the tomato, and cook down.
Add the carrot and green beans and cook until they still have bite.
Return the chicken, fold through the sweet pepper, and finally the plantain, so it does not break up.

What a modern chef changes

Each component cooked to its own endpoint, and the plantain protected

Rungs 1 and 6

Method

Two-stage the plantain. 140°C for 4 minutes to cook through and convert starch to sugar, rest 5 minutes, then 180°C for 90 seconds for the shell.
Do not fry in crude red palm oil. Rung 1 as a rule: 180°C destroys carotene fast. Fry in something neutral and add a spoonful of good crude oil at the end for colour and aroma.
Build the sauce on a real stock. Rung 6. Poach the carcass and wings while you fry, reduce that liquor, and use it in step 3 instead of water and a cube. This is where the bouillon habit is most entrenched and most easily broken.
Time the vegetables separately. Carrot, bean and pepper have three different cooking times and the standard version gives all three the same one. That is why the pepper is usually dead.

Notes

Part Four

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists