East Africa and the Islands · Volume 18, The Indian Ocean Islands
Rougaille
Mauritius
Illustration
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 225 sources in the brief
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 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 medium onion, sliced
- 2.5cm ginger, grated
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 red chilli, finely chopped
- 4 sprigs thyme
- 400g tinned tomatoes
- to taste salt
- 2 tbsp coriander
- 3 large eggs
To finish
- to serve parsley
Method
- Fry the onion in the oil until golden.
- Add the ginger, garlic, chilli and thyme and cook 3 to 4 minutes.
- Add the tomatoes and simmer 20 to 25 minutes, until thick.
- Season with salt and stir in the coriander.
- Break the eggs into the sauce, cover, and poach them about 5 minutes.
- Scatter with parsley and serve.
Notes
After Selina Periampillai's egg rougaille, the most fully quantified version available to a British cook and written by a British Mauritian.
The egg rougaille is Restaurants.mu's. Its salted fish rougaille, credited to Nu La Cuisine, blanches 250g of snoek, fries it in two tablespoons of oil and flakes it, sweats onion, curry leaves and thyme a minute, adds garlic, ginger and chilli for 2, then five blanched tomatoes for 5 before the fish goes back in; it is not salted, because the fish already is. Cuizine Maurice cooks its salt fish rougaille 15 minutes and 5 more.
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.