Southern Africa · Volume 19, Nshima and the Relish
Ifisashi
Bemba Zambia, visashi in Nyanja
Illustration
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 146 sources in the brief
Vegetarian by default and meat optional. The point Western sources always miss is Rung 3: the groundnut goes in raw and powdered, not roasted and pasted. Read the ratio below: about 180 g of raw groundnut powder to 450 g of greens, roughly 40 per cent of the green weight. This is a sauce built almost entirely out of nut, and it sets rather than coats.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 450 g collard greens, or stripped pumpkin leaf, chopped
- 1 large tomato, chopped
- 180 g raw groundnuts, pounded and sieved
- 480 ml water
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda, or 1 cup of chidulo
- ¼ tsp salt
Method
- Strip the coarse outer fibre from the stalk and central rib of every leaf, then wash them leaf by leaf. That instruction is in the Zambian source and in no British one, and it is the difference between a relish and a mouthful of string.
- Cook the greens with the soda and the tomato 5 to 8 minutes.
- Add the groundnut powder, salt and water.
- Simmer covered 15 to 20 minutes on low, stirring continuously once the groundnut is in.
Notes
After Tembo, using collard greens, which is what he specifies for a readership without Zambian leaf to hand.
What a modern chef changes
Three preparations instead of one pot, on a kapenta base
Rungs 2, 4, 1 and 5
Method
- Separate the three components. Blanch the leaf hard in heavily salted water for 90 seconds and refresh in iced water, which fixes the green. Reduce the tomato separately to a concentrate. Bring the groundnut to a sauce on its own. Combine only long enough to warm through.
- Build the liquid out of kapenta rather than water. Dry toast 25 g of whole dried kapenta until it smells nutty, steep it in 500 ml of water at 70°C for 20 minutes, strain through muslin, and use that as the 480 ml. Rung 4, and the largest single improvement available to this dish.
- Hydrate the groundnut powder cold before it meets heat. Slake it into 100 ml of the cool stock. Raw groundnut powder dropped into a hot pot behaves exactly like dry maize meal dropped into boiling water: the outside sets and seals dry particles inside. Rung 1's principle, applied to a different powder.
- Move the soda to the end and halve it. A quarter teaspoon in the last five minutes softens and greens the leaf without the soapy slipperiness and without twenty minutes of thiamine destruction. Rung 5.