Saka-madesu

cassava leaves and beans cooked down together for hours until the two stop being separate things

Origin: Bangui, the Ubangi & the Congo Basin

From the journey of Cassava.

The name is the recipe: saka is cassava leaf and madesu is beans. Putting them together is a piece of nutritional sense arrived at long before anyone could have explained it. Cassava root is starch and very little else, and a diet resting on it runs short of protein; the leaf, unusually for a leaf, carries a substantial amount, and the beans carry more. A household eating this with a cassava fufu is eating a complete meal built from one plant and one legume. Cassava leaves need long cooking and there is no way round it. They are pounded to a coarse green paste and then simmered for an hour at minimum, both to break down the fibre and to drive off the cyanogenic compounds the raw leaf carries. This is the same logic that governs the root, where soaking and fermenting do the same job, and it is one of the reasons cassava took as long as it did to become safe food after the Portuguese introduced it from Brazil in the sixteenth century. It is eaten across the Ubangi and Congo basins with no regard for the borders drawn through them. The Central African Republic, both Congos, and northern Angola all cook it, and the differences are matters of whether groundnut goes in, how much palm oil, and what smoked protein is to hand.

Ingredients

  • 500 g pounded cassava leaves, frozen or fresh
  • 300 g dried red kidney or borlotti beans, soaked overnight
  • 5 tbsp red palm oil
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 5 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 3 tomatoes, chopped
  • 2 leeks or 4 spring onions, sliced
  • 100 g smoked fish, flaked, or 3 tbsp ground dried crayfish (optional)
  • 2 scotch bonnet chillies, whole
  • 1.2 litres water
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste

Method

  1. Drain the soaked beans, cover with fresh water, and boil hard for ten minutes, then simmer for forty-five minutes to an hour until tender. Do not salt them until they are soft. Keep the cooking liquid.
  2. Put the cassava leaves in a large pot with the 1.2 litres of water and bring to the boil. Simmer for forty-five minutes, topping up if it dries. This step cannot be shortened.
  3. Meanwhile fry the onions and garlic in the palm oil until soft, add the tomatoes and leeks, and cook down for ten minutes.
  4. Stir the fried aromatics into the cassava leaves along with the smoked fish and the whole chillies.
  5. Add the cooked beans with a ladleful of their liquid. Season with the salt.
  6. Simmer together, uncovered, for a further thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. The mixture should thicken and darken and the palm oil should show at the edges. The leaves and beans should no longer read as two separate ingredients.
  7. Taste for salt. Serve with chikwangue, cassava fufu, or plain rice.

Notes

Frozen pounded cassava leaf from an African grocer is the practical route and is already prepared; fresh leaves must be pounded or very finely chopped first, and neither should ever be eaten undercooked. An hour and a half of total cooking is a minimum rather than a target. For a vegan version omit the fish and crayfish and add a tablespoon of ground groundnut for depth, which is standard practice in parts of the region anyway.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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