Poulet nyembwe

Gabon's national dish: chicken simmered in the thick orange cream pressed from palm fruit, sharp with chilli and nothing else to hide behind

Origin: Libreville & Gabon

From the journey of Oil Palm.

Nyembwe is a Myene word and it names the sauce rather than the bird. It is the cream pressed from boiled palm fruit, the same preparation the Congo calls moambe and Angola muamba, and Gabon's national dish is simply chicken cooked in it. There is very little else in the pot: onion, chilli, sometimes a tomato, and salt. A dish this bare is entirely dependent on the quality of one ingredient, which is why Gabonese cooks are particular about the fruit and dismissive of the tinned substitute. The palm reached this forest with Bantu-speaking farmers moving south and east out of the Cameroon grassfields around two and a half thousand years ago, and it travelled well for a reason that is easy to miss: it did not really need to be planted. The oil palm is a light-demanding pioneer that will not establish under closed canopy but colonises ground that has been cleared and burnt. Farming the forest manufactures palm groves as a by-product, so wherever the clearing went, the tree followed. The dish is eaten with cassava sticks, plantain, or rice, and traditionally with the smoked river fish of the Ogooué as an alternative to chicken. It is served at weddings and funerals and on any occasion where a Gabonese household is showing what it can do, which in a country of two million people and a great deal of forest amounts to a national statement.

Ingredients

  • 1.2 kg chicken, jointed into 8 pieces
  • 1.2 kg fresh palm fruit, or 600g tinned palm nut concentrate
  • 2 onions, one chopped and one sliced
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 2 tomatoes, chopped
  • 3 scotch bonnet chillies, two whole and one chopped
  • 2 tbsp groundnut oil
  • 1 stock cube
  • 1 small bunch of basil or nyembwe leaf, if available
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 1.5 litres water

Method

  1. Boil the palm fruits in water for thirty to forty minutes, until the flesh gives under a thumbnail. Drain.
  2. Pound the hot fruits in a mortar to strip the flesh from the stones without cracking the nuts. Add 800ml of hot water, work the pulp hard by hand, and strain, pressing through. Repeat with the remaining water. Discard fibre and stones. With tinned concentrate, whisk it into 1.2 litres of hot water.
  3. Season the chicken with salt and brown it in the groundnut oil in a heavy pot, in batches, until well coloured. Set aside.
  4. Fry the chopped onion and garlic in the same pot until soft, then add the tomatoes and chopped chilli and cook down for eight minutes.
  5. Pour in the palm liquid, return the chicken, add the whole chillies and the stock cube, and bring to a simmer.
  6. Simmer uncovered for forty to forty-five minutes, stirring occasionally. The sauce should reduce by about a third, thicken to the consistency of double cream, and show clear orange oil at the edges.
  7. Add the sliced onion in the last ten minutes so it keeps some texture, and the basil in the last two.
  8. Taste for salt and heat. Serve with plantain, cassava sticks, or rice.

Notes

With so few ingredients there is nothing to disguise a poor sauce, so the extraction is worth doing properly: press the pulp twice and discard nothing until the fibre yields only pale water. Do not cover the pot, since the whole point is reduction. If the finished sauce tastes thin, reduce further rather than adding concentrate. Smoked catfish makes an excellent version and needs only fifteen minutes in the pot.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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