Isombe

pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly with groundnut paste and aubergine: the green dish at the centre of the Rwandan and Burundian table

Origin: Kigali, Bujumbura & the Great Lakes

From the journey of Cassava.

Isombe is the cassava-leaf dish of Rwanda and Burundi, and what separates it from its Congolese neighbour is the groundnut. Where pondu and saka-saka down in the Congo basin are built on red palm oil, isombe is thickened and enriched with groundnut paste, which gives it a nuttiness and a body the palm-oil versions do not have and turns it from a green vegetable into something substantial enough to carry a plate. Aubergine goes in too, usually the small bitter African kind, and often a handful of spinach or amaranth alongside the cassava leaf. It is eaten with ubugali, with rice, or with boiled plantain, and it appears at ordinary weeknight meals and at weddings without changing much. The cassava leaf itself needs long cooking and there is no way round it. Pounded to a coarse green mash and simmered for the better part of an hour, both to break down the fibre and to drive off the cyanogenic compounds the raw leaf carries. Rwandans and Burundians pound it in a wooden mortar rather than chopping or blending, and the texture that produces is part of what the dish is. Eating the leaf as seriously as the root is a Central African habit rather than a South American one, and it matters nutritionally: cassava root is very nearly pure starch, whilst the leaf carries a substantial amount of protein and a good deal of iron. A household eating isombe with ubugali is eating a complete meal off one plant and one legume.

Ingredients

  • 700 g pounded cassava leaves, frozen or fresh
  • 150 g smooth unsweetened peanut butter
  • 2 small aubergines, diced
  • 200 g spinach or amaranth leaves, chopped
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 2 leeks or 4 spring onions, sliced
  • 4 tbsp oil
  • 1 green chilli, chopped (optional)
  • 1 stock cube
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 900 ml water

Method

  1. Put the pounded cassava leaves in a heavy pot with the water and bring to the boil. Simmer for forty-five minutes, topping up if it dries. Cassava leaf must be thoroughly cooked and this step cannot be shortened.
  2. Meanwhile fry the onions, garlic, and leeks in the oil until soft, about ten minutes.
  3. Add the aubergine and cook for a further eight minutes until it begins to collapse.
  4. Stir the fried mixture into the cassava leaves along with the stock cube and salt.
  5. Loosen the peanut butter with a ladleful of the hot cooking liquid until smooth, then stir it into the pot. Slaking it first is what stops it clumping.
  6. Add the spinach and simmer uncovered for a further twenty-five minutes, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens and darkens and no longer tastes of raw groundnut.
  7. It should be thick enough to mound on a spoon rather than run. Taste for salt and add the chilli if using.
  8. Serve with ubugali, rice, or boiled plantain.

Notes

Frozen pounded cassava leaf from an African grocer is the practical route and is already prepared; never use it undercooked. Slake the peanut butter with hot liquid before it goes in, and give it at least twenty minutes afterwards so the raw taste cooks out. The dish is naturally vegan as written. For the Burundian version, which is very close, some cooks add a little palm oil alongside the groundnut, which moves it a step towards Congolese pondu.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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