East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Rougaille
Mauritius
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Note the register, because British writing collapses it. In Réunion a rougail is most often a raw crushed condiment; in Mauritius rougaille is the cooked tomato sauce itself and a whole category of main dish: onion, ginger and garlic paste, curry leaf and thyme, ripe tomatoes, about 30 minutes on low heat. The Mauritian account of it is social as much as technical: a dish of scarcity, eaten with rice, lentil soup and pickled chillies, upgraded to salted fish on payday. Salted snoek is what makes it taste Mauritian rather than Italian.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 20 minutes, and it wants 30.
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp oil
- 1 medium onion, sliced
- 2 spring onions
- 2 cm ginger
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 bird's eye chilli
- 4 sprigs thyme
- 1 fresh tomato
- 400 g tinned chopped tomatoes
- 2 tbsp coriander stalks
- 4 eggs, or 300 g desalted snoek
Method
- Onion into the oil, 2 minutes.
- Spring onions, ginger, garlic and bird's eye chilli, and thyme, 3 to 4 minutes.
- Fresh tomato, 1 minute.
- Tinned tomato and coriander stalk, 5 minutes.
- Break in the eggs and finish under the grill, or fold through the desalted salt fish.
Notes
After Selina Periampillai's egg rougaille, the most fully quantified version available to a British cook and written by a British Mauritian.
What a modern chef changes
Reduced to the real time, the curry leaf placed correctly, and the salt fish soaked with a plan
Rungs 4 and 1
Method
- Give it the thirty minutes. Rung 4. The version above is an honest weeknight build. Take the tomato stage from 5 minutes to 25 and the sauce stops being sharp and green and starts coating the spoon. That single change is worth more than any ingredient you could add.
- Curry leaf goes in at the beginning, into hot fat, not at the end. It is sesquiterpene led and its aroma is fat borne. Scattered late it contributes almost nothing, which is why so many British cooks conclude curry leaf is subtle. It is not subtle. It is badly placed.
- Soak the snoek, then taste the soaking water before you salt anything. That water tells you how much salt the sauce needs, and it is the only reliable way to know, because salted snoek varies enormously between packets.
- Roussir the onion, then quench with the fresh tomato before the tin goes in. The fresh tomato is not redundant next to the tin: it is the quench, and it has the acid and the aromatics the tin cooked out.