Gboma dessi

the Togolese spinach stew, African eggplant leaves cooked down with palm oil, tomato and smoked fish until dark and glossy

Origin: Lomé & southern Togo

From the journey of Eggplant / Aubergine.

Gboma dessi means gboma sauce, and the gboma is the leaf of Solanum macrocarpon, the African eggplant. That is worth stating carefully, because the plant is not the Asian aubergine grown for its fruit. It is a separate species, domesticated in West Africa from the wild Solanum dasyphyllum, and it is grown here principally for its leaves, with the fruit eaten as a bitter secondary crop. A West African market sells three or four distinct Solanum species that a European shopper would call one vegetable. The leaf is thick, slightly mucilaginous, and mildly bitter, and it stands up to long cooking in a way spinach does not. Cooked down with red palm oil, tomato, onion, and smoked fish, it darkens almost to black and thickens on its own without any starch. The mucilage is the point rather than a flaw: the sauce should cling and draw slightly behind the spoon. It is the everyday sauce of southern Togo and is eaten with akumè, with ablo, or with rice, and it crosses the border into Benin without changing, the Ewe and Mina country running through both. Where gboma cannot be had, cooks abroad use spinach, and the result is a decent dish that a Togolese would identify immediately as a substitute: the bitterness and the draw are both missing.

Ingredients

  • 700 g gboma (African eggplant leaves), or spinach as a substitute, roughly chopped
  • 6 tbsp red palm oil
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 4 tomatoes, chopped
  • 2 tbsp tomato purée
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 200 g smoked fish, boned and flaked
  • 300 g fresh fish or beef, in small pieces
  • 2 tbsp ground crayfish
  • 2 scotch bonnet chillies, chopped
  • 1 stock cube
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 300 ml water

Method

  1. Wash the gboma leaves thoroughly and chop them roughly. If using mature leaves, strip out any thick central stalks, which stay fibrous.
  2. Warm the palm oil gently in a wide heavy pan until it liquefies and brightens. Do not let it smoke.
  3. Fry the onions and garlic until soft and golden, about eight minutes.
  4. Stir in the tomato purée and cook it out for three minutes, then add the chopped tomatoes and chillies and cook down hard for twelve minutes, until thick and the oil separates.
  5. Add the fresh fish or beef and the smoked fish with the water, and simmer for fifteen minutes.
  6. Add the leaves in handfuls, pushing each down into the pot before adding the next. They will collapse to a fraction of their volume.
  7. Stir in the ground crayfish, stock cube, and salt, and simmer uncovered for twenty to twenty-five minutes, stirring occasionally.
  8. The sauce is ready when it has darkened substantially, reduced so that it mounds slightly on a spoon, and shows red oil at the edges. Taste for salt and heat.
  9. Serve with akumè, ablo, or plain rice.

Notes

Gboma leaves are sold frozen in African groceries and that is the practical route outside West Africa. Spinach works as a stand-in but releases far more water and carries none of the bitterness, so reduce the added water to 150ml and expect a milder sauce; a handful of chopped kale alongside gets closer to the texture. The palm oil is structural rather than a frying medium, and cutting it back gives a thin, sharp sauce.

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