Southern Africa · Volume 19, Nshima and the Relish
Muriwo une dovi
Shona Zimbabwe
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 25 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Built on roasted paste rather than raw powder, and the clearest illustration of Rung 3. Maroyi's Shurugwi respondents describe the everyday version plainly: young leaves and shoots boiled with salt and fried in oil with tomato and onion, with peanut butter sometimes used instead of cooking oil. Read that carefully. The dovi is the fat. It is not a flavouring stirred into a vegetable dish; it is the frying medium replaced. A note on quantities. The ethnobotanical source gives the method and not the weights. The quantities below are working ones, stated as mine.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 as relish. About 25 minutes.
Ingredients
- 500 g pumpkin leaves (muboora), stripped and chopped
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 tomatoes, chopped
- 3 tbsp dovi, 100 per cent peanut
- to taste salt
Method
- Boil the leaves in salted water until tender, 10 to 15 minutes for fresh leaf. Drain, keeping the cooking water.
- In a wide pan, cook the onion and tomato down until collapsed and jammy. Use the dovi as the fat here, not oil: it will melt, loosen and begin to fry.
- Add the drained leaves and turn them through.
- Loosen with the reserved cooking water and simmer gently 5 minutes. Salt after the leaf is soft, not before, which is the order the Zimbabwean pot vocabulary encodes.
What a modern chef changes
Cook the dovi out, split the addition, never let it boil
Rungs 3, 2 and 5
Method
- Cook two thirds of the dovi out before anything else goes in. Two tablespoons into a warm pan with the onion and a little oil, over low heat, until the oil visibly separates and the paste darkens. You are generating pyrazines and volatilising hexanal, which is why this smells roasted rather than green.
- Hold the last tablespoon back and stir it in off the heat. The long cook destroys the volatile top notes; the late addition restores them.
- Blanch and refresh the leaf rather than boiling it in the sauce. Ninety seconds in heavily salted water, then iced water. Rung 2, and the difference between a relish that looks alive and one the colour of an old army blanket.
- Keep it under 85°C from the moment the dovi is in. Peanut protein stops emulsifying above that and the sauce breaks into oil over grit. A splash of cold stock whisked in hard off the heat will sometimes bring it back. Usually it will not.