Ladob

The Seychellois coconut pudding, ripe plantain and sweet potato simmered in coconut milk with vanilla and nutmeg until the fruit is glazed and the milk has thickened

Origin: Mahé and the Seychelles

From the journey of Coconut.

Ladob is the Seychellois word for a dish that goes two ways. The sweet version, the common one, simmers ripe plantain, sweet potato, and breadfruit in coconut milk with vanilla, nutmeg, and sugar until the fruit is soft and glazed and the milk has reduced to a thick pale sauce. The savoury version uses salted fish, cassava, and green plantain in the same coconut base and is a main course. The islands are a Creole crossroads with no indigenous population before the eighteenth century, and the kitchen assembled itself from French planters, East African and Malagasy labour, and later Indian and Chinese traders. Coconut, vanilla, and nutmeg were all plantation crops here, and the fact that a domestic pudding uses all three says something about what was growing over the garden wall. Seychellois vanilla is worth naming. The islands grew it as a serious export crop in the nineteenth century, hand-pollinating the orchid by the method a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion had worked out in 1841, and although the industry has shrunk to almost nothing the pod still turns up in the domestic cooking of the islands in a way it does not in most tropical kitchens.

Ingredients

Fruit

  • 4 ripe plantains, peeled and cut into thick rounds
  • 400 g sweet potato, peeled and cut into chunks

Base

  • 600 ml coconut milk
  • 150 ml thick coconut cream

Aromatics

  • 1 vanilla pod, split and scraped
  • 0.5 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1 cinnamon stick
  • 2 strips lime zest

Sweetening

  • 80 g caster sugar, or to taste

Seasoning

  • 0.25 tsp fine salt

Method

  1. Put the coconut milk, vanilla pod and seeds, cinnamon, nutmeg, lime zest, sugar, and salt in a wide pan and bring gently to a simmer.
  2. Add the sweet potato and simmer for ten minutes.
  3. Add the plantain rounds and simmer for a further twelve to fifteen minutes, turning them once, until both are tender and the milk has thickened noticeably.
  4. Stir in the coconut cream and cook for three minutes more, without letting it boil hard.
  5. Fish out the cinnamon stick, vanilla pod, and lime zest. Taste and adjust the sugar.
  6. Serve warm or at room temperature, in bowls with the sauce spooned over.

Notes

Breadfruit is the third traditional component and is used when in season; it behaves much like the sweet potato here. Use a real vanilla pod. The dish has very few flavours in it and extract does not carry the same weight. Satini, the sharp relish of grated green mango or papaya with chilli, is the Seychellois counterpoint to this and appears at the same meal.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

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