Rougaille

the mother sauce of the Mascarenes: tomatoes cooked down hard with ginger, garlic and thyme until they collapse into a base that will carry anything

Origin: Port Louis & Mauritius

From the journey of Tomato.

Rougaille is not a dish so much as the foundation most Mauritian dishes are built on. Tomatoes are cooked down with onion, garlic, ginger, thyme, and chilli until they lose all their water and collapse into a thick, deeply savoury base, and into that goes whatever the household has: salted fish, sausage, prawns, chicken, or nothing at all. A Mauritian kitchen without rougaille is not operating. The name is French and the sauce is Creole. Mauritius was uninhabited until the Dutch, then held as Île de France from 1715, then British from 1810, and its population was assembled from enslaved Africans and Malagasy, French planters, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese traders. Rougaille carries fingerprints from most of them: a French tomato base, ginger and chilli in quantities no French cook would use, thyme and curry leaf side by side, and a technique of reduction that owes more to the Indian Ocean than to Provence. What distinguishes it from any other tomato sauce is how far the reduction goes. This is not a simmered sauce but a dried one: the tomatoes are cooked until the oil separates and the mixture mounds on a spoon, which concentrates them and gives the sauce enough body to hold fish without going watery. A rougaille that pools on the plate has been undercooked. Réunion makes the same sauce, and the two islands argue about the thyme and the chilli whilst agreeing on everything else. In both, the everyday version is rougaille saucisse, made with Creole sausage and eaten with rice, lentils, and a chilli paste.

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 900 g ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
  • 2 large onions, finely sliced
  • 6 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 large thumb of ginger, grated
  • 4 sprigs of thyme
  • 8 curry leaves
  • 2 bird's eye chillies, chopped
  • 4 tbsp oil
  • 500 g Creole or smoked sausage, thickly sliced, or 400g salted fish, soaked
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste

To finish

  • 3 spring onions, chopped
  • 1 small bunch coriander, chopped

Method

  1. If using sausage, brown it in the oil in a heavy pan and lift it out. If using salted fish, soak it for an hour in several changes of water, then flake and fry briefly.
  2. In the same pan, cook the onions over a medium heat until soft and golden, about ten minutes.
  3. Add the garlic, ginger, chillies, thyme, and curry leaves and fry for two minutes until fragrant.
  4. Add the tomatoes and the salt and turn the heat up.
  5. Cook uncovered for twenty-five to thirty minutes, stirring often and crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pan as they soften.
  6. Keep going well past the point where it looks like a sauce. The water must go completely: the mixture should darken, thicken until it mounds on a spoon, and show oil separating at the edges. This is the whole technique and it cannot be shortened.
  7. Return the sausage or fish, lower the heat, and simmer together for eight minutes so it takes up the sauce.
  8. Taste for salt and heat. Scatter over the spring onion and coriander and serve with plain rice, a lentil dal, and a chilli paste.

Notes

Tinned tomatoes work perfectly and are what many Mauritian households use out of season; drain them first, as the extra liquid only lengthens the reduction. Thyme and curry leaves together look wrong on paper and are exactly right here. For a vegan rougaille, leave out the protein entirely and serve it over rice with lentils, which is how it is eaten during Hindu fasting periods.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Journey Point Map Key

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