Legim

As tradition built it

Legim

Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour 30 minutes, plus 30 minutes to an hour marinating.

Ingredients

The meat

• 900g stewing beef
• 1 lime
• 80ml epis
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp salt free mixed herbs
• ⅛ tsp ground cloves
• 2 sprigs thyme

The pot

• 360ml water
• 30ml olive oil
• 120ml onion, roughly chopped
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 240ml chicken broth or water
• 1 bouillon cube

The vegetables

• 2 chayote, peeled and sliced
• 720 to 960ml cabbage, green or purple
• 960ml spinach
• 1 large aubergine, peeled and sliced
• 2 to 4 carrots, halved
• 240ml string beans
• 1 tbsp cooking margarine
• 1 hot pepper

Method

1. Squeeze the lime over the beef, keeping the halves. Trim off excess fat, rub each piece with the lime halves, and rinse it under cold water.
2. Mix the epis and the dry spices into the meat and leave it in the fridge 30 minutes to an hour.
3. Put the meat and thyme in a pot with the water over a medium heat. Cover and cook 30 minutes.
4. Lift the meat into one bowl and the liquid into another. Over a low heat, put the oil, meat, onion and garlic in the pot and fry about a minute. Stir in the tomato paste, then the reserved liquid, the broth and the bouillon cube.
5. Add the vegetables in this order: chayote, cabbage, spinach, aubergine, carrots. Cover and cook on a low to medium heat for 45 minutes, taking the carrots out after 20.
6. Lift the cooked vegetables into a bowl and mash them with a potato masher or a pestle.
7. Return them to the pot with the string beans and margarine. Taste for salt. Add the hot pepper and the carrots, cover, and simmer on a low heat 15 to 20 minutes.
8. Serve with white rice and sòs pwa, black bean purée.

Notes

The recipe is Manie Chery's, of Love For Haitian Food, from her mother, family and friends. KreyolCuisine browns the meat first, cooks the vegetables 25 minutes, purées only the aubergine, and finishes with vinegar and cloves for 20 minutes more.

What a modern chef changes

Vegetables Puréed, Meat Cooked Separately

Rungs 1 and 6

Method

1. Cook the beef sous vide to full, fall-apart tenderness on its own timeline, rather than the roughly two-hour stovetop simmer the tradition uses, which risks unevenness in a larger cut. Rung 6.
2. Blend and pass a portion of the cooked vegetables through a chinois for a genuinely silky purée base, folding the remaining vegetables back in whole for texture, rather than the uniformly mashed result a long stovetop simmer gives.