The Horn · Volume 12, The Nile Foodways
Mullah kawal
Kordofan, Darfur and the Nuba Mountains
Illustration
- Time
- About 40 minutes to 2 hours 15Our estimate, from comparable dishes.
- Researched
- Researched from 124 sources in the brief
The flagship of the cuisine, and almost unknown outside Sudan. Cassia obtusifolia, sicklepod, is a wild legume that comes up on the seasonal watercourses during the rains. Its leaves are pounded to a paste, buried in a sealed earthenware jar for a fortnight, and dried into black balls that keep indefinitely. What comes out is roughly 20 per cent protein on a dry-matter basis and rich in sulphur amino acids, which is precisely what a diet of sorghum and groundnut is short of. So the dish is a stew of onions, oil, dried okra, salt and pepper, with sharmout or mince in the pot and the fermented leaf stirred in last. The literature calls kawal a substitute for powdered sharmout, which is the protein logic; the Sudanese cooks use both. The Nuba make it as a soup with bone broth, and the Darfuri court cooked it and credited it with detoxifying properties.
As tradition built it
Ingredients
The base
- 60 to 120ml oil
- 3 medium onions, in small cubes
- 240ml sharmout (dried meat), ground
- 2 large cinnamon sticks
- a small piece ginger
- a small piece galangal
- 4 tbsp dry tomato powder
- as needed water
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
To finish
- 2 tbsp weika (dried okra), ground
- 1½ tsp salt
- ½ spoon ground coriander
- ½ spoon black pepper
- 3 large cloves garlic, crushed fine
- 1 tbsp, optional dakwa (peanut butter)
- 3 tbsp kawal
- 2 green shatta chillies
- 2 tbsp samn (ghee)
Method
- Cook the onions in the oil in a pot until light golden.
- Add the sharmout and stir until it toasts. Add the cinnamon, ginger and galangal and stir a little.
- Add the tomato powder and keep stirring.
- Add water, as much as you want, and boil, stirring all the time, until the onion dissolves.
- Stir in the tomato paste.
- Add the weika and salt, beating with the mufraka, the wooden whisk, until smooth.
- Add the spices and the garlic. Loosen the dakwa in a little water and stir it in. Taste for salt.
- Add the kawal, stir until it is blended through, and leave it on a low heat.
Notes
Kawal goes into a pot that already has meat in it, sharmout or mince, and it goes in last.
Serve with aseeda or kisra.
The recipe is Hiam Jaafer's, for Sudan Journal; her list has samn and green chillies that her method does not place. All the Sudanese cooks read put kawal with meat, sharmout or mince, and add it last. Madiha Shaybo adds white karkade water.
What a modern chef changes
Split the dose, early and late, and give it the acid partner it needs
Rungs 2, 6 and 3
Method
- Split the kawal in two. Half at step two, cooked in from the start, so the simmer drives the ammonia off and leaves the free amino acids: depth without the top note. Half grated in off the heat at the end, so the alkaline ammoniacal lift survives to the table. This is the most interesting variable in the chapter and it costs nothing.
- Give it an acid partner, or the top note reads as sharp. A spoonful of rob stirred in below simmer, or lime off the heat, not both. Rung 6: at low pH casein is near its isoelectric point and breaks into grains in a bubbling pot.
- Use bone broth, as the Nuba do. Kawal is a free glutamate source and bone broth an inosinate source, and the two multiply rather than add. Not a modernist import: the Nuba version of the dish.
- Grate it to order, like bottarga. The dried ball is not a storage compromise, it is a service format. Ferment in bulk, dry, grate at the pass. The tradition invented that workflow.