Pondu, or saka-saka

As tradition built it

Serves 6. About 2 hours.

Ingredients

• 1.2 kg fresh or frozen cassava leaves, reducing to about 600 g pounded
• 200 ml red palm oil
• 100 g natural unsweetened groundnut paste
• 400 g smoked fish, or smoked meat
• 2 onions, sliced
• 3 garlic cloves
• 2 small bitter aubergines, quartered (Brazzaville style)
• to taste salt

Method

1. If the fresh or frozen cassava leaves are not already ground, pound them to a fine, almost pesto-like mash. Not chopped. Rung 2 for why the distinction is mechanical rather than sentimental.
2. Blanch the pounded leaf 30 minutes in boiling water. Drain.
3. Sweat the onions and garlic cloves 5 minutes in the red palm oil.
4. Combine and simmer 1 hour, stirring every 10 to 15 minutes. It will look wrong for the first forty of those minutes. Keep going.
5. Slacken the natural unsweetened groundnut paste with hot water so it does not seize, and stir it in.
6. Add the crumbled smoked fish and the small bitter aubergines and cook 20 to 30 minutes more, to what one Central African source calls a melting, uniform texture. That phrase is the endpoint: nothing should read as a separate leaf. Salt to taste.

Notes

The enriched version, with groundnut.

The leaner version, with no groundnut: boil frozen leaves 10 minutes, drain, return to the pot with water, palm oil, sliced onion and salt, simmer 1 hour, add crumbled smoked fish, cook 20 to 30 minutes more. From dried leaf: soak 30 minutes in hot water first, then a total cook of 60 to 90 minutes.

What a modern chef changes

Stock instead of water, oil in two stages, acid at the end

Rungs 3, 4 and 5

Method

1. Use smoked fish stock as the cooking liquid and keep the fish out of the pot. Rung 3. Strain, defat, reduce by a third, simmer the leaf in that, then flake a smaller quantity of good smoked fish in at the end for texture and top note. You will use less fish and taste more of it.
2. Split the palm oil. Rung 4. 120 ml at step 3 to carry the aromatics and emulsify into the leaf over the hour; the remaining 80 ml warmed to 60°C and stirred through off the heat at service. The colour goes from brown-olive to green and orange and the smell changes completely.
3. Finish with acid, and measure it. Rung 5. Taste the pot: if it is flat it is short of acid, not salt. 30 g of chopped ngai ngai for the last three minutes, or the juice of half a lime off the heat. Do this before reaching for the salt and you will use half as much.
4. Put one brittle thing on it. A shard of dehydrated cassava crisp, or 20 g of groundnuts toasted dark and crushed coarse, scattered at the table.