East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Ladob
Seychelles
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Read the caveat before the recipe, because it is the more important half of this entry. The research for this chapter reached no Seychellois-published source on Seychellois cooking at all. Ladob appears in English travel writing, in recipe round-ups and in Wikipedia, and those accounts are consistent with one another, which is not the same as being correct: consistency across mutually plagiarising sources is what you would expect either way. The record says ladob exists in two forms sharing one architecture. Sweet: ripe plantain with sweet potato, yam or cassava, boiled in coconut milk with sugar, nutmeg and vanilla. Savoury: salted fish simmered in coconut milk with plantain and cassava, nutmeg and salt. The nutmeg and vanilla pairing is the Seychellois signature and it crosses both registers, which is the one genuinely distinctive thing in the account. The architecture I can vouch for even where I cannot vouch for the dish: starchy tubers and green plantain cooked in a fat-and-sugar-bearing liquid gelatinise more slowly and hold their shape, while the coconut solids concentrate as the liquid reduces.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- to taste salted fish, soaked and desalted
- 3 green or barely ripe plantains, in thick rounds
- 300 g cassava or sweet potato, in chunks
- 400 ml coconut milk
- ½ tsp grated nutmeg
- 1 vanilla pod
- to taste salt
Method
- Soak the salted fish, changing the water at least once, and taste the water before deciding on salt.
- Put the plantain and cassava in a pan with the coconut milk and enough water to cover.
- Simmer until the starch is tender.
- Add the fish, the nutmeg and the vanilla, and finish gently.
What a modern chef changes
The vanilla used as a seasoning rather than an ingredient, and the coconut protected
Rungs 5 and 3
Method
- Split the pod, scrape it, and put the wall in too. Rung 5. Around 2.5 per cent of a cured pod is vanillin and 171 aromatic compounds have been identified in it, and almost all of that mass is in the wall rather than the seeds.
- Infuse the vanilla in the coconut milk, warm, off the heat, for 20 minutes before you start, then strain and cook with the infused milk. Vanillin and its companions are lipophilic, so they extract into the fat phase and not into water. One pod for four covers is the ceiling.
- Hold back a third of the coconut milk for the last ten minutes. Rung 3's second half: a long simmer breaks the emulsion into oil and curd.
- Grate the nutmeg at the pass, not into the pot. Myristicin and sabinene are volatile and forty minutes of simmering removes most of what makes nutmeg worth having. The tradition puts it in early because a cook over a fire grates once. You do not have that constraint.