Moroho

the everyday greens of the Basotho highlands, wild leaves and kale cooked down with onion until soft, dark and faintly bitter

Origin: Maseru & the Lesotho Highlands

From the journey of Kale.

Moroho in Lesotho, morogo in South Africa, imifino in Zulu: the word names a category rather than a single plant, and the category is cooked leaves. Traditionally these were gathered rather than grown, and the gathering was and is women's knowledge. Amaranth, cowpea leaves, pumpkin leaves, spider plant, and blackjack all go under the name, and a good gatherer can name twenty edible species in a field a European would read as weeds. What has changed is the plant rather than the dish. Kale and rape, introduced by Dutch and British settlers, grow through the southern African winter and crop reliably in a smallholder's plot, and over the twentieth century they moved to the centre of what moroho means. Many Basotho households now cook kale as a matter of course and gather the wild greens seasonally alongside it. The dish is the same and the botany has shifted underneath it, which is worth saying plainly rather than pretending the modern version is the ancient one. It is eaten with papa, the stiff maize porridge, at very nearly every meal, and in Lesotho it is the vegetable component of a diet that is otherwise heavily maize and meat. The cooking is unfussy: onion, water, long enough to go soft, salt. Some households add tomato, some a spoonful of groundnut, and the highlands version is generally plainer than the South African one. Lesotho is entirely surrounded by South Africa and the two share this dish completely, as they do the language boundary that runs through both.

Ingredients

  • 800 g kale, rape, or mixed wild greens, stalks stripped and leaves shredded
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 3 tbsp oil
  • 2 tomatoes, chopped (optional)
  • 1 green chilli, chopped (optional)
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 250 ml water

Method

  1. Strip the tough central stalks from the kale and shred the leaves finely. Wild greens want washing carefully and picking over.
  2. Heat the oil in a heavy pan and fry the onion until soft and lightly golden, about eight minutes.
  3. Add the tomatoes and chilli, if using, and cook for six minutes until collapsed.
  4. Add the greens in handfuls, pushing each down before adding the next. They reduce dramatically.
  5. Pour in the water, season with the salt, cover, and cook over a low heat for fifteen to twenty minutes.
  6. Uncover and cook for a further five minutes, stirring, until the water has largely gone and the greens are soft, dark, and glossy rather than sitting in liquid.
  7. Taste for salt. Serve with papa.

Notes

Southern African moroho is cooked soft rather than kept bright and crisp, and greens still squeaking against the teeth would be considered undercooked. Kale is what most households now use and is what this recipe is built on; if you can get amaranth or pumpkin leaves, use them and shorten the cooking by five minutes, as they collapse faster. A spoonful of groundnut flour stirred in at the end is a common enrichment and moves the dish towards Malawian ndiwo.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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