Central Africa · Volume 08, The Forest Larder
Fumbwa
DR Congo and across the basin
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 103 sources in the brief
- Reviewed
- Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Awaiting a cook report
Gnetum africanum is a gymnosperm liana, more closely related to a conifer than to spinach, and it behaves accordingly. Rung 2's argument about mechanical breakdown applies here in its most extreme form. Cut it as finely as you physically can, and then cook it long anyway.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus soaking.
Ingredients
- 200 g dried fumbwa, cut to fine threads
- 400 g smoked dried catfish
- 4 tbsp natural groundnut paste
- 2 tomatoes, chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 3 garlic cloves
- 100 ml red palm oil
- to taste salt, chilli
Method
- Soak the smoked dried catfish overnight, or a minimum of 2 hours. Drain, rinse, boil 10 minutes until tender.
- Boil the dried fumbwa until tender. The sources disagree badly here: 5 minutes in one account, 20 in another. Dried Gnetum varies enormously in age and toughness, so cook to a texture endpoint: yielding to the tooth, no squeak and no straw.
- Add the natural groundnut paste, slackened first, and cook 5 minutes more.
- Separately sweat the onion, garlic cloves and fresh tomatoes.
- Combine, top with the red palm oil, and simmer low until it comes together. Salt, and add chilli to taste.
Notes
After the diaspora method of Nadine Pembele, who is explicit that "in Africa we don't use measurements, we add ingredients to taste", and who notes that getting real smoked catfish where she lives takes two to three weeks.
A competing set of timings runs 20 minutes boil, 15 minutes with aromatics, then 20 minutes low with the groundnut paste and half a cup of palm oil. Both circulate and both work with the right leaf.
What a modern chef changes
Rehydrate properly, shred finer than you think, split the oil
Rungs 2, 3 and 4
Method
- Rehydrate long and cold before anything hot happens. Two hours in cold water, not fifteen minutes in hot. Cold rehydration lets water into the fibre bundles without setting the surface, and it is the difference between tender and stringy at the same cook time.
- Re-shred after rehydration. Rung 2, and the step everybody skips. Rehydrated leaf is far easier to cut fine than dried leaf. Roll the wet leaves into a tight cigar and cut a genuine chiffonade at 1 mm. It looks obsessive and it is the entire dish.
- Use smoked fish stock and keep some fish out. Rung 3. Same argument as pondu, more so here, because fumbwa's long cook drives off aromatics even faster.
- Split the palm oil. Rung 4. Two thirds during the cook to emulsify with the groundnut, one third warmed and stirred through at the end. Groundnut plus palm oil plus a long cook is an emulsion, and treating it as one is what stops it splitting into greasy threads.