East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Mataba
Comoros
Illustration
- Time
- 4 hours
- Researched
- Researched from 225 sources in the brief
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 an error is being repeated here. I could not resolve it, and it is in the final section.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. At least 4 hours on a very low heat.
Ingredients
The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.
- cassava leaves, fresh
- 2 onions
- 2 cloves garlic
- optional chillies
- 5 coconuts, grated and pressed for milk
- to taste salt
To serve
- optional fried fish
- to serve rice
Method
- Strip the cassava leaves from the stems and pound them in a mortar.
- Peel and slice the onions, peel the garlic, and crush them in the mortar with the chillies.
- Grate the coconut flesh and press it for its milk.
- Bring the milk to the boil in a pot and salt it.
- Stir in the pounded leaves and aromatics.
- Simmer until the liquid has gone completely, at least 4 hours.
- Serve with rice, and fried fish if you like.
Notes
The recipe is Recettes de Mayotte's, a blog of Mahorais cooking; Mayotte's Shimaore kitchen is of the Comorian tradition, and no recipe from Grande Comore, Anjouan or Mohéli was reached. Souimanga, cooking in Sada, pounds the leaves very fine with onion and chilli and cooks everything about 2 hours, drying it out at the end. Afrik.com's Comorian version uses 1.5kg of leaves and 2 litres of coconut milk for about an hour and a half. None fries the aromatics.
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