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Southern Africa · Volume 19, Nshima and the Relish

Chikanda

Bemba, north eastern Zambia

Chikanda: a firm dense loaf of pinkish brown orchid and groundnut meal, sliced across into thick even rounds that hold their shape cleanly like polony.

Illustration

Time
40 minutes

Dried terrestrial orchid tubers are pounded to a meal, then boiled into a slurry with groundnut meal, salt, bicarbonate of soda and chilli powder. The mixture thickens as the soda goes in, rises like a dough as it simmers, and sets to a firm cake that is sliced and eaten as a snack, a side or a main. It is sold on the street, in supermarkets and in high end Lusaka restaurants. Functionally it is a traditional African terrine set with a plant hydrocolloid, with groundnut supplying the fat and protein that make the texture read as meat rather than jelly. The uncomfortable part. The tubers are harvested exclusively from the wild, and collecting one kills a perennial, long lived plant. DNA barcoding of market material in Lusaka and Kitwe identified 16 orchid species across 6 genera, chiefly Disa, Habenaria and Satyrium, against the two species originally reported. An estimated 2 to 4 million tubers move annually from Tanzania into Zambia despite CITES, with Soweto market in Lusaka the trade hub and June and July the peak. Availability in Britain is zero and it should stay that way.

As tradition built it

Serves 6. Covered 10 minutes, then 15 to 30 minutes under coals.

Ingredients

  • 250 g dried chikanda (orchid) tubers
  • 500 g groundnuts, pounded to a powder
  • 480 to 720 ml water
  • to taste salt
  • to taste chilli powder
  • ¾ tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • a little water, to dissolve the soda

Method

  1. Wash the chikanda in clean cold water. Spread it on a tray and let it dry.
  2. Pound the dry chikanda in a mortar and sieve out the fine powder. Pound and sieve again until most of it is powder.
  3. Pour the 480 to 720 ml of water into a medium pot. Stir in the groundnut powder, at least a cup of it, to a light paste.
  4. Set the pot on a charcoal brazier and stir without stopping until the groundnuts are cooked.
  5. Add the chikanda powder bit by bit, still stirring, until the paste turns thick. Season with salt and chilli powder.
  6. Dissolve the bicarbonate in a little water and stir it in. The mixture turns very thick.
  7. Keep stirring hard with a wooden spoon until the chikanda is cooked and has turned brown.
  8. Cover the pot and leave it 10 minutes.
  9. Take the pot off the fire. Turn the lid upside down, set charcoal from the brazier on it, and let the top bake and brown, 15 to 30 minutes.
  10. Let it cool, then slice.

Notes

Recorded as documented. The sources give the components and the sequence and no quantities.

The method is Precious's at Zambian Kitchen, with Gloria Miyoba's at Kitwe Online for the serving count. Miyoba starts 500 g of pounded groundnuts in a litre of cold water, uses a pinch of soda, and leaves the coals on the lid 10 minutes before turning the chikanda out. Precious lists 500 g of groundnut powder but puts "at least a cup" into the water and does not say where the rest goes.

What a modern chef changes

An honest facsimile, labelled as one

Rungs 5 and 3

Method

  1. Understand what is doing the setting, with the caveat attached. The mechanism generally given is that orchid tubers are packed with glucomannan, the polysaccharide that makes salep and konjac behave as they do, and that under alkaline conditions it cross links into a thermally irreversible gel, which would make the bicarbonate a setting agent rather than a leavener. No primary chemistry confirming that could be found, and this chapter treats it as plausible and unconfirmed.
  2. If you want the texture, use konjac and say what you have made. Start at 10 g konjac flour to 400 ml water and 150 g groundnut, whisked cold, brought slowly to a simmer, a quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate whisked in at the end, poured into a lined terrine and chilled. It is not chikanda. It has the right behaviour and none of the provenance, and blurring that would make the recipe sound better and the book worse.
  3. Toast the groundnut here, do not use it raw. The one Zambian dish where a deeper roasted character earns its place, because there is no leaf and no tomato to carry flavour. Rung 3, used in the Zimbabwean direction on purpose.
  4. Season it like a terrine, at the pass. Chilli, salt and a squeeze of lime on the slice, not only in the mix.
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