Central Africa · Volume 08, The Forest Larder
Poulet nyembwe
Gabon, Myene name
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 15
- Researched
- Researched from 103 sources in the brief
Cook this a week after dish one. Same technique; they do not taste remotely alike, and everything separating them happens in the first ten minutes and the last five. Gabonese sources are consistent on two moves Kinshasa does not make: the bird is smoked rather than fresh, and sorrel goes into the sauce. Whether smoking is the defining Gabonese difference or one common option is unsettled.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 1 hour 15 from a tin.
Ingredients
- 1 large bunch of fresh palm nuts, or 800 g tinned palm nut pulp
- 1 smoked chicken, jointed
- 2 whole chillies, unpierced
- 1 good handful a good handful of sorrel or ngai ngai leaves
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 garlic cloves
- to taste, 1 cube salt, and a stock cube in the original
Method
- Boil the large bunch of fresh palm nuts to cook them. Pound in a mortar until the skin separates from the nuts. Transfer to a basin, add water, work to a rather thick paste. Remove the nuts and fibres while pressing, so the juice remains. From a tin, dilute and proceed.
- Simmer with the onion and garlic cloves until it thickens and oil begins to show.
- Add the jointed smoked chicken and cook 20 minutes, until it has given its smoke to the sauce.
- Add a good handful of sorrel or ngai ngai leaves and the whole chillies, unpierced. Unpierced matters: the chilli perfumes without releasing heat, a distinction British cooks rarely make and should.
- Salt, and serve.
Notes
After a Gabonese account giving quantities for six.
A Gabonese magazine records the claim that the dish is "capable of bringing together yesterday's enemies", and calls it the darling of Gabonese stomachs. Read that as social fact rather than flavour description.
What a modern chef changes
Smoke controlled at two stages, and the sorrel treated as the acid it is
Rungs 3, 5 and 4
Method
- Smoke the bird yourself, in two stages. Low smoke a whole chicken over beech or vine shoots at 60 to 70°C for 90 minutes, then joint it. Penetration and collagen conversion without cooking the breast to string. Commercial smoked chicken is usually hot-smoked to a rubbery finish and it is the weak link in the diaspora version.
- Split the smoke. Rung 3. Half the flavour comes from the bird at step 3; the other half from a strained smoked-fish infusion added in the last two minutes, putting volatile phenolics on top of the dish rather than driving them off it.
- Treat the sorrel as an acid dose, not a garnish. Rung 5. Weigh it: start at 40 g of leaves for this quantity, taste, go up. Sorrel does here what lime does in Kinshasa, and twenty minutes of cooking does neither job.
- Two unpierced chillies and a third variety at the pass. Mazzia's principle: a scotch bonnet for fruit, a bird's eye for cutting heat, a pinch of dried smoked chilli at the end. Three flavours, not one dial.