Palm butter soup

Liberia's national pot: palm fruit cream cooked down for hours with smoked fish and greens until the red oil rises, ladled over rice

Origin: Monrovia & Liberia

From the journey of Oil Palm.

Palm butter soup is Liberia's national dish and the plainest statement of what the Upper Guinea coast eats. Palm fruit cream, smoked fish, a little meat, greens, and heat, cooked long enough that the oil separates and floats, and served over rice. There is no thickener, no flour, and no tomato base. The fruit does all of it. The name causes confusion abroad because there is no butter and no dairy of any kind. Palm butter is the English term for the pressed cream of the boiled fruit, which sets firm when cool much as butter does, and the sauce is sometimes sold in tins under that name. Liberians also call the finished dish hot pepper soup in some counties, which is a better description of how much chilli goes in. The rice underneath is not incidental. This coast domesticated its own rice, Oryza glaberrima, some three thousand years ago, and rice and palm oil are the two things the region has always had. When enslaved people from this coast were taken to the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, the rice expertise went with them and built the plantation economy there. Palm oil travelled the same route as ship's provisioning. Sierra Leone cooks the same soup, and in Ghana and Nigeria the same fruit cream becomes abenkwan and banga. What distinguishes the Liberian version is its length: four hours is not considered excessive, and the soup is judged by how completely the oil has broken free.

Ingredients

  • 1.5 kg fresh palm fruit, or 800g tinned palm butter or palm nut concentrate
  • 600 g beef or goat, in 3cm pieces
  • 300 g smoked fish, boned and flaked
  • 200 g raw prawns, peeled (optional)
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 3 habanero or scotch bonnet chillies, chopped
  • 200 g collard, kale, or cassava leaf, finely shredded
  • 2 tbsp ground crayfish
  • 2 stock cubes
  • 1 tsp ground dried chilli
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 2 litres water

Method

  1. Boil the palm fruits for thirty to forty minutes until soft, pound, and extract the cream with hot water, straining and repeating until the fibre is spent. You want about 1.5 litres of thick liquid. Tinned palm butter should be whisked into the same volume of hot water.
  2. Brown the meat in a dry heavy pot with a little salt, then add the onion, garlic, and chopped chillies and cook for five minutes.
  3. Pour in the palm liquid and bring to a simmer.
  4. Simmer uncovered, stirring every ten minutes or so, for a full hour. Resist the urge to hurry it. The soup will darken from orange towards brick red and reduce by roughly a third.
  5. Add the smoked fish, ground crayfish, stock cubes, and ground chilli. Continue at a bare simmer for a further thirty to forty minutes.
  6. When a thick layer of clear red oil has risen and pooled on the surface, the soup is ready in the Liberian sense. This is the whole test and it cannot be faked by adding oil.
  7. Stir in the greens and the prawns, if using, and cook for a final eight to ten minutes.
  8. Taste for salt and heat; it should be genuinely hot. Ladle over plain boiled white rice, making sure each plate gets some of the surface oil.

Notes

Two hours is a floor rather than a target, and Liberian cooks who have four will use them. The oil separating is the doneness test; if it has not happened, keep going rather than adding palm oil, which gives greasiness without the depth. Cassava leaf, if used, must be added early with the smoked fish and given a full forty minutes. Leftovers improve overnight and the set oil is stirred back in on reheating.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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