The Horn · Volume 12, The Nile Foodways
Kajaik, or mullah kajek
The Sudd and the White Nile
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 124 sources in the brief
Kejeik is large Nile fish, split longitudinally, gutted and beheaded, then hung on ropes or spread on rock and branches in direct sun; the drying run in one study ran March to June and removed about 85 per cent of the water. Then the step worth keeping: the dried pieces are stacked on mats, covered with another set of mats, and trodden, then shade-dried and given roughly a further month of indoor maturation before market. The treading is a compression step, and it turns a rack of dried fish into a dense storable slab. Same reasoning as pressing a cheese, arrived at with feet and mats.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus soaking.
Ingredients
- 200 g kejeik (dried Nile fish), or cod stockfish
- 3 onions, sliced
- 100 ml groundnut or sesame oil
- 2 tbsp unsweetened peanut butter
- 15 g weika
- 400 g tomatoes, blended
- 1.2 L water
- to taste salt, black pepper, chilli, garlic
Method
- Soak the kejeik (dried Nile fish), or cod stockfish, in cold water until pliable, then pick it over, removing skin and bone. Stockfish takes longer than you expect and the time depends entirely on the thickness of the piece, so go by feel rather than by clock.
- Cook the onions slowly in the groundnut or sesame oil until deep and soft.
- Add the blended tomatoes and cook it down towards al wish.
- Add the fish and the soaking liquid, made up to about 1.2 litres, and simmer.
- Slake the unsweetened peanut butter with a ladle of hot liquid in a separate bowl, then stir it back in.
- Add the weika, stirring, and bring back to a mullah's consistency.
- Season with the salt, black pepper and chilli, and finish with crushed garlic off the heat.
Notes
No source in the briefs gives a kajaik method with timings, and this chapter will not pretend one exists. What follows is the documented mullah architecture with kejeik as its protein, which is what the dish is.
What a modern chef changes
Extract the fish instead of boiling it, split it between stock and texture, slake the nut before the acid
Rungs 3 and 2
Method
- Extract rather than boil. A lump of dried fish boiled for an hour gives up its glutamate, its good aromatic fractions, its coarse acrid ones and its partly oxidised fat all at once, along with grit and skin. Steep instead: covered with water held at around 70°C for 40 minutes, never boiling, strained through muslin, chilled, the fat lifted off, then reduced by a third. That liquid is the dish.
- Split the fish between the stock and the bowl. Two thirds into the extraction, one third soaked separately and flaked in at the end so there is something to find. A mullah sieves its solids out by design, but kajaik is a fish dish and total dissolution is a loss here.
- Slake the peanut butter before any acid goes near it. This is the salatat dakwa lesson and it is a water-in-oil to oil-in-water inversion: the paste has to take up water first, and if lime or tomato hits it while it is still fat-continuous it splits and will not come back.
- Cold-hydrate the weika, add it off the boil, and buy the right peanut butter. Supermarket paste with sugar, palm oil and an emulsifier sweetens the sauce and will not split and re-emulsify the way this cuisine's nut sauces are built to.
Notes
Part Four