Meal 108: Mauritius

What happens when an uninhabited tropical island in the Indian Ocean suddenly gets people of various backgrounds showing up? Well, aside from other things including the extinction of the dodo, a complex and delicious cuisine emerged in Mauritius. French, Indian, and Chinese cuisines, plus rich soils, waters, and a longstanding sugarcane industry, make for an abundant cuisine whose variety far outpaces the island's modest population. Mauritians are also enthusiastic about their cuisine to the extent that there are a lot of recipes out there, so it was tough to pick out what to cook!

The evening's guests included: Julie, Julie's mom, Levi, the Tenenbaum/Ellenby family, Marguerite, Kristin, Rene, Kerri, and their companions.

Alooda | Fruity chewy milk | Recipe

If you think plain ol' milk could use a little more flavor and a lot more texture, then this is the drink for you. This recipe is essentially the same in name and recipe to the South Indian falooda, with fruit syrup adding color and flavor, and various confections adding texture, in this case basil seeds and diced agar-agar. The basil seeds (on the right) in particular are crazy: one tablespoon soaked in warm water can grow to close to a cup in size, with those tiny black seeds absorbing a nearly unbelievable amount of water.

As far as the fruit, I couldn't find the sort of commercially-produced fruit syrup that's commonly used for this sort of thing these days, so I made one from scratch with frozen strawberries.

The result of the concoction was as you might imagine: tasty flavor, really odd texture.

Rougaille | Tomato sauce | Recipe

This is a really simple dish, just some tomatoes simmered with some pungent veggies and gentle herbs, that plays an outsized role in Mauritian cuisine. It's so versatile as a side dish, a condiment, or a simmer sauce. As with so many simple yet fundamental dishes, the quality of ingredients, as well as the choice to add or remove an ingredient, makes a big difference in the result. I particularly enjoyed the addition of curry leaves, which added an exotic flavor to a dish composed of otherwise familiar ingredients.

Gateaux piments | Spicy split pea fritters | Recipe

While the name means "pepper cakes," the bulk of these little fried balls is yellow split peas. But instead of being really mushy as we've come to expect from cooked peas, these are instead merely soaked before being ground. The result is a somewhat grainy texture that makes for a great frying surface on the outside, and an interior that holds together while still having a bit of cornmeal-style grit. If I were in Mauritius I'd eat these things from street stalls all the darn time. Perhaps wrapped up in a...

Dholl puri | Yellow split pea flatbreads | Recipe

Another dish, another novel use for split peas. This time, it's as a part of flatbreads. The name is a bit deceiving: puri is a pan-Indian term for a puffy, fried bread made of a simple wheat dough, but these are cooked dry more like chapati. These were quite flavorful, with the cooked and ground peas contributing color, flavor, and texture, a great all-purpose protein-and-starch powerhouse to accompany the rest of the meal. Big thanks to Deena for her excellent stuffing, rolling, and pan-toasting skills.

Achards | Pickles | Recipe

Crisp, tangy vegetables make a nice contrast to the generally soft foods of this meal. Gotta say, though, that mine turned out pretty boring and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe I didn't let them marinate long enough?

Cari poisson | Fish curry | Recipe

Often, fusion food is delightfully brash: a Korean taco, for instance, is a tastebud-jarring collision of two very different culinary traditions. A Mauritian curry is of the subtler cross-cultural variety. Picture a standard tomato-onion-curry powder sauce, with some sort of protein in it...yet also with fresh herbs! I've never seen thyme and parsley in an Indian dish, let alone fresh, but once you consider what a French cook would add to a tomato-and-onion base, it makes sense. The fresh herbs and powdered spices blend in a complex yet complementary manner. This was a darn good dish, spooned into some of that dholl puri!

Gateau la cire | Chinese New Year cake |Recipe

Mauritius has a small, but culinarily influential, Chinese population. This meal fell right in the middle of Chinese New Year celebrations, the perfect time to try out this dessert. While I've seen hints of versions with other additions such as dried fruits, I stuck with what as far as I can tell is the traditional version, flavored with nothing but sugar. Luckily, I was able to find real Mauritian sugar, the "dark muscovado" type with the full molasses content, and a quite complex flavor with hints of various spices, retained. (Weirdly, most of what we know as "brown sugar" is actually white sugar with a bit of molasses added back in.)

The direct translation of the French name "wax cake," and that's a pretty close description of the texture, which is not a surprise given that it's sticky rice flour steamed for hours. It was acceptably tasty, thanks to the proper sugar, but really interesting enough to want to try again.

Meal 105: Mali

Mali sits squarely in the Sahel, the semi-arid band between the Sahara Desert and the more tropical West African coast. It's the original home of the peanut sauce stew found all over West Africa, while in the north you'll find influences from across the desert.

Our guests were Linda, David, Caitlin, Zoie, Amy, Nicole, David, Stephanie, and friend. Nicole and Stephanie did Peace Corps in Mali, as well as my friend Emily who was a huge help with the menu.

Salade malienne | Green salad with fried plantains and potatoes

Emily says that a salad in Mali is a basic green salad — lettuce, onion, tomato, etc. — with two notable additions. One is that the dressing is made with a salt-and-MSG-laden Maggi bouillon cube. The other is fried plantain and french fries. I left out the potato part, but did the plantains and Maggi-cube dressing, and wow that was a fun, tasty, and probably not-very-good-for-you salad.

Widjila | Beef stew with dumplings | Recipe

This dish comes from the north of Mali, the area around Timbuktu, abutting the southern edge of the Sahara. This dish clearly has a very strong influence from the other side of the desert, with rich spices like cinnamon, and a slow, gentle braise evoking North African tastes and styles. The yeasted wheat dumpling is curious, as it looks much more like something from Eastern Europe than anything I've found in African cuisine. As you'd expect, this dish was equally tasty and filling.

Mafé poisson | Fish in peanut sauce | Recipe

Peanut sauce is a classic West African preparation, and I chose to make this one with fish to reference the bounty of the Niger River. The sauce recipe is par for the course with what I've cooked from other nearby countries, however by this point I've learned my lesson, and I don't add much water to start — I've waited for an over-thin sauce to cook down too many times! You can always add more water.

We served this with fonio, a grain that's roughly the size and fluffiness of couscous, but with a nutritional value in the ballpark of quinoa. Back when we cooked the Guinea meal I estimated that it might become the next quinoa; since then, The Guardian wrote an article about a chef in New York who's trying to make it happen. It's still tough to find; our friend Anna made the effort to send it to me from a store in Brooklyn.

Dégué fonio | Milky pudding | Recipe

A dessert common to this part of the world involves various sorts of soured dairy mixed with grain. Given that I had fonio on hand, that's what I used. Whether or not you like this dish depends entirely on how much you like your dairy tangy, and whether creamy-mushy is your thing. (It is for me.)

Meal 102: Malawi

Malawi's a landlocked country in southern Africa, hugging the lake with which it shares a name. And Laura's sister's husband just so happened to do Peace Corps there, so Scott provided some enthusiastic and thorough advice on what to cook.

Joining us for the meal were Brett, Kaely, Lisa, Audrey, Elizabeth, Amy, and Jérémy and his French companions.

Nali sauce

Probably the single food item that other Africans will recognize from Malawi is this notoriously spicy chili sauce. While there's a site in Australia that seemed to be the only way to get it shipped to the US, they were completely out of stock when I checked before the meal. So, I had no alternative but to try it on my own, and to help me with this, Scott shared the ingredients and a description:

"Ingredients: water, birds-eye chilies, fresh paprika, onions, acetic acid, garlic, salt, stabilizer (E415), antioxidant (E300), preservative (E211).

It's quite simple. It doesn't come off as vinegar based despite the acetic acid... very heavy on the paprika and onion. No oil-- that would be more of a west african Piri Piri, at least in my experience. Out of the bottle it flows but is still a bit chunky."

So into the blender I threw these ingredients, minus the preservatives, and used dried paprika instead of what was probably meant to be bell pepper. To keep things easy (and spicy!) I used a whole pack of frozen Thai chilies, seeds and all. I regret not taking down the proportions, because the result was quite tasty, spicy for sure but with some body from the onions.

Fish and chips

As Scott describes: "at all markets and bus stands you will find chippies, which are thick cut potatoes fried in low grade vegetable oil in a freestanding, flat-topped fryer. These are the best thing ever, sprinkled with caked salt, chili powder, and fresh minced cabbage with vinegar. Man I am getting hungry." I couldn't stomach getting the actually cheapest oil I could find, but I did go with good old Wesson. Armed with a really puny french-fry slicer I got for a quarter at a yard sale, a sack of Russets, and a wok, I did my best version of roadside stand chips, complete with toppings. Very tasty.

Along with that I simply fried some tilapia filets, the closest thing I could find to chambo, a popular fish from Lake Malawi. On its own, plain fried tilapia is decent, but with some Nali sauce and the potatoes, all generously doused in vinegary shredded cabbage, it was a darn good snack.

Nsima | Cornmeal mush

Again, Scott: "The key is getting the nsima just right. It is typically cooked over an open fire and takes some serious arm strength-- constant stirring for 10-20 minutes at a full boil as it thickens. It's all basic food but challenging to get right." The best cornmeal to use is masa intended for tortillas, and just like other African mushes, you start by boiling water and then adding the grain until it's the right thickness. Nsima makes for the huge proportion of most Malawian meals.

Ndiwo | Vegetable stew | Recipe

As an indication of the primacy of the nsima, the vegetables typically served with it are generally referred to as "relish" in English. That is, they're there more to give flavor to the mush than as a substantial element of the meal. It's pretty much any green you can find — pumpkin greens are apparently the most common but it seems that almost any cookable leaf would work — sauteed and simmered with onion and tomato.

Beans | Recipe

Several sources, including Scott, rave about the quality of the beans in Malawi. It's unclear whether the beans themselves are so tasty, or if it's more about how they're prepared, but I gave it my best shot, and indeed they were quite flavorful. What's most distinctive about this technique is that the beans aren't drained, but rather cooked in a relatively small amount of water which then becomes a rich sauce once vegetables are added. My only variation on the recipe was to use vegetable oil, which surely is more authentic to the region than the specified olive oil.

Sweet potato ice cream | Recipe

The only thing this has to do with Malawi is featured ingredient. Dairy is rare in Malawi and refrigeration even less common. But I'd just gotten the machine and we were in a heat wave, so I took some creative license. It tasted like Christmas with cinnamon and nutmeg, and had a bit of graininess to it which was surprisingly pleasant.

Meal 101: Madagascar

The same geographic isolation that's led to the lemurs and other unique fauna and flora for which most of us know this island, also meant that even though it's not far on an absolute basis from where humankind emerged in East Africa, it wasn't settled until around 2,000 years ago. And, improbably, those settlers were Austronesian, probably from Borneo, having crossed the Indian Ocean westward in canoes — in other words, from the same ethnic core as Hawaiians and even Easter Islanders. As they did wherever they went, those Austronesians brought rice and pork with them, too.

Madagascar is so big — the fourth-largest island in the world — that before Europeans showed up, the folks living there didn't have a name for it. So there was nobody to tell Marco Polo that he really messed up when he confused the island with Mogadishu, the port city and current capital of Somalia, and then got it really wrong. So while Madagascar is indeed an exotic-sounding name, it was accidentally invented by a Venetian.

Our guest of honor was Mimi, from Madagascar, who helped us plan the meal and also help us understand what we were eating and why. We also had his wife Kirsten, their son, and Deena, Bengt, Molly, Julie, Levi Laura, Anna, Judy, Haley, and Mary — a big enough crowd that we needed two whole tables!

Vary | Rice

The basis of virtually every Malagasy meal, it’s typically served in tremendous quantities. I’m figuring its predominance is a legacy of the Austronesians. Despite its importance, I couldn’t find any description of how they cook it; Mimy said to just do the “normal” method of bringing to a boil then steaming.

Ranovola | Rice water

The water in Madagascar isn’t safe to drink, so you need to boil it. But the big pot was just used for making a bunch of rice, and it’s a pain to scrub off the bits of rice stuck to the bottom. The Malagasy solution is brilliant: just boil the water in the pot along with the stuck-on bits! The water gets a delightful toasty flavor, and the pan is a lot easier to clean.

You can drink this rice water warm or chilled; I chilled it. The flavor was indeed nice and nutty, though Mimy suggested I could have boiled it a bit longer to make the flavor even deeper.

Ravitoto sy henakisoa | Pork with cassava leaves | Recipe

Pork from the Austronesians and cassava from the African mainland (after having been originally brought from Brazil) combine to make a national dish that’s very emblematic of Madagascar’s cultural geography. I have to admit that cassava-leaf stews just aren’t my favorite, though to be fair I’ve only had them made from rock-hard chunks of frozen leaves, which can’t be ideal. That said, this was among the better I’ve had, the pork definitely adding a richness that central African preparations have tended to lack.

Tsaramaso | Beans | Recipe

Unlike several other African bean dishes I've made, which are very straightforward preparations with just a few vegetables for flavor, this one has two features that make for more flavor. The first is cooking the vegetables first and making a broth out of that, so the flavors can be absorbed throughout cooking rather than just mixed in at the end. The second is some seasoning, in the form of curry — perhaps we can thank trading ships on the Indian Ocean for that contribution. It went extra well with some fried tilapia, which probably should have been whole filets but ended up as pieces due to a bit of kitchen miscommunication. Oh well! All tasty over the requisite pile of rice.

Ro mazava | Broth | Recipe

When there's not much money or food around, a meal may consist solely of some rice supplemented by a weak broth of greens or maybe some bits of fish or meat. In my enthusiasm to incorporate a broad variety of Malagasy foods, I kinda went overboard, and made a broth of greens and fish in addition to the whole rest of the meal. Mimy said you probably wouldn't serve such a broth if you have other stuff, but all the same, it added some nice flavor to drink it warm alongside the meal.

Sakay | Hot sauce | Recipe (in French)

What a surprisingly successful condiment, especially considering I couldn't find a single recipe that gave proportions. To translate the linked recipe interpreted by what I did: equal parts by volume of garlic and black pepper (since there seems to be nowhere in the US to get the specified Voatsiperifery pepper), and a little less of bird's eye chilies (I used frozen ones from the Asian grocery). I threw in enough vinegar and oil to make a smooth texture, dashed in a bit of dried ginger and salt, and whizzed it up in the little food processor. The abundant black pepper gives it an unusual and intense dimension, and most importantly, Mimy said he loved it! We ran out, and

Mofo akondro ou koba | Steamed banana and peanut cake | Recipe

Fried desserts are a delicious treat, but really annoying for a chef who also wants to enjoy the dinner party rather than clean up the kitchen and spend time away from the guests wrangling hot oil. So, instead of the fried bananas which seem to be Madagascar's number one dessert, I went for another that can thankfully be made ahead of time: a batter of mashed bananas and rice flour spread onto banana leaves, wrapped around ground peanuts, and poached for a long time (I used the crock pot). The texture firmed up as it was supposed to, but it was pretty bit bland, and Mimy pointed out how it should be improved: put caramelized sugar in with the peanuts! Makes sense to me.