Southern Africa · Volume 19, Nshima and the Relish
Kapenta with tomato and groundnut
Zambia and Zimbabwe, where it is matemba
Illustration
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 146 sources in the brief
Dried kapenta soaked briefly, then shallow fried with onion, tomato and groundnut powder, and eaten with the starch. It is relish, not snack, and treating it as a garnish is the commonest British misuse of the ingredient. A note on quantities. The in-tradition sources describe the components and the sequence but give no weights. What follows is that sequence with working quantities of my own, said plainly rather than dressed up.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 as relish. About 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 100 g whole dried kapenta or matemba, heads on
- 2 tbsp groundnut or sunflower oil
- 1 large onion, sliced
- 3 tomatoes, chopped
- 2 tbsp raw groundnuts, pounded and sieved
- to taste salt
Method
- Rinse in two changes of cold water and soak 10 minutes. Drain well. Pick out any that have gone yellow: that is oxidised fish oil and it will not improve.
- Fry the onion in the oil over medium heat until soft and beginning to colour.
- Add the tomato and cook down until it collapses and the oil separates.
- Add the drained kapenta and cook 8 to 10 minutes, turning gently, until it has taken up the sauce.
- Stir in the groundnut powder and enough water to loosen, and simmer 5 minutes, stirring. Salt at the end.
What a modern chef changes
Split the bag: steep half, fry half
Rungs 4, 2 and 3
Method
- Make a dashi with half of it. Fifty grams dry toasted until it smells nutty rather than fishy, steeped in 500 ml of water at 70°C for 15 to 20 minutes, strained. That liquor is the sauce base.
- Reduce the tomato separately. Three tomatoes down to a dark, thick paste on their own with a pinch of salt, about twenty minutes, so it goes in as a concentrate rather than as a wet fruit that must be boiled dry inside the relish. Rung 2.
- Fry the other 50 g hard and late. Neutral oil, hot, 60 to 90 seconds, drained and salted, scattered at the pass. One ingredient, two textures, and the crunch survives because it never met the sauce.
- Bring the groundnut in cold and finish at a bare simmer. Above 85°C the peanut protein stops emulsifying and you get an oil slick. Rung 3.