Not Just Stew · The atlas · A working atlas of the world's cooking

Maritime Southeast Asia · Volume 46, The Sago, the Citrus Cure and the River Before the Road

Hinava

Kadazan-Dusun, Sabah

Hinava, Kadazan-Dusun raw fish with bambangan: thin slices of pale raw mackerel tossed with shallot, ginger and red chilli, a scattering of coarse grated ochre-coloured bambangan kernel through it.

Illustration

Time
10 minutes
Researched
7 sources cited

Traditionally tenggiri, Spanish mackerel, cured with the native lime limau kapas rather than the calamansi now commonly substituted, per a 91-year-old Kadazan elder interviewed for the record.

As tradition built it

Serves 6 to 8. Ten minutes' rest; nothing is cooked.

Ingredients

  • about 1.5kg (2.5 kati) tenggiri (Spanish mackerel) fillet, deboned
  • 360ml lime juice
  • 4 to 5 tbsp bambangan, grated and dried
  • 5cm piece bitter gourd, thinly sliced
  • a little salt, for rinsing the gourd
  • 4 to 5 red chillies, thinly sliced
  • to taste salt

Method

  1. Slice the bitter gourd thin and rinse it with salt.
  2. Put the fish, lime juice, bambangan, bitter gourd, chillies and salt in one bowl.
  3. Mix thoroughly.
  4. Leave 10 minutes before serving. Nothing is cooked: the lime juice cooks the fish, so everything must be fresh and clean.

Notes

The recipe is Puteri (Enuvung) Manisa's, from her blog of Momogun Rungus recipes. Sumandak Kadazan's Borneo Bonita salts the gourd, cures 600g of fish in 120ml of lime juice or vinegar 10 minutes, then adds shallots, young ginger, chillies, salt and sugar. A Kadazan elder from Penampang, as MySabah reports, rinses the fish briefly in hot water until it whitens; no recipe read does.

What a modern chef changes

Both of hinava's real corner-cuts named and refused, plus the same UK safety step umai needs.

Rung 2

Method

  1. Freeze the fish solid for at least 96 hours before curing, the same non-negotiable UK safety step umai's elevation uses.
  2. Do not swap the bambangan kernel for anything else if you can source it at all. MySabah.com is explicit that "most hinava served at restaurants is a simplified modern version" precisely because the kernel gets omitted; it is what differentiates this dish from umai, not a garnish.
  3. Where bambangan genuinely cannot be sourced, say so on the plate rather than pretending green mango is equivalent. Green mango covers the sour fruit-flesh role reasonably; nothing sold in Britain reproduces the kernel's specific savoury, faintly fermented depth.
Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists