East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Mataba
Comoros
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Again the caveat first, and this one is sharper. Every account available describes mataba as pounded cassava leaf, used much as spinach is, cooked with coconut milk rather than with pork, and served with steamed green banana and meat, fish or prawns. It is present in the tradition of Comorian marriage, and it is structurally ravitoto with the pork removed for religious reasons and coconut put in its place, which is exactly what you would predict from an archipelago with a Malagasy undertow and a 95 per cent Muslim population. And the one Comorian-presenting website found in the research describes mataba as something else entirely: a national bread made from banana or yam leaves and cooked as a grilled cake. That contradicts every other source in existence. Either that site is unreliable on the archipelago's most important dish, or this chapter is repeating an error. I could not resolve it, and it is in the final section rather than quietly smoothed over.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour 30.
Ingredients
- 200 g ground cassava leaves, rehydrated overnight
- 400 ml coconut milk
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 cloves garlic
- 20 g ginger
- 2 tbsp oil
- 400 g prawns, or firm white fish, or beef
- to taste salt
- to serve green bananas, steamed, to serve
Method
- Sweat the onion, garlic and ginger in the oil.
- Add the rehydrated pounded cassava leaf and enough water to cover, and cook it down over low heat until the water has gone.
- Add the coconut milk and the prawns, fish or beef, season with salt, and finish.
- Serve with steamed green banana.
What a modern chef changes
The leaf given its full cook, the coconut protected, and the protein kept out of the long stage
Rungs 3 and 1
Method
- Give the leaf the full long cook before anything else joins it. Rung 3. Pounded cassava leaf is cyanogenic and fibrous and it wants at least an hour of low heat with fat present, and the doneness cue is the ravitoto cue: the free water has gone. Every shortcut version of this dish is short at exactly this step.
- Cook the leaf in oil first and add the coconut milk only in the last ten minutes. A ninety-minute simmer in coconut milk gives a broken, oily, curdled sauce.
- Cook the prawns separately and fold them in off the heat. Ninety seconds in a hot pan, then in at the very end.
- Roussir the base. Rung 1. The Comorian larder has no wine, no pork and no stock cube, so the only savoury depth available in this pot is what you build in the first five minutes with an onion and some patience.
Notes
Part Four