Sishwala

Eswatini's stiff maize porridge, cooked down hard and turned out as a firm pale mound, eaten by hand with soured milk or a meat relish

Origin: The Highveld and Lubombo, Eswatini

From the journey of Corn.

Sishwala is the centre of the Swazi plate and it is deliberately plain. White maize meal is stirred into boiling water and cooked down far stiffer than a porridge, until it holds a spoon upright and can be turned out as a firm mound and torn off with the fingers. It is the same food that South Africa calls pap, Zimbabwe sadza, and Zambia nshima, and across that whole belt the pattern is identical: a bland dense starch, eaten by hand, paired with whatever relish the household has. In Eswatini the fixed partner is emasi, milk soured in a gourd until it thickens and separates, which is regarded less as a food than as a cornerstone. Emasi over sishwala is the standard meal, and a beef or chicken relish, wild greens, or beans appear when they are available. Maize is a newcomer here despite its dominance. It reached southern Africa from the Portuguese Atlantic trade in the sixteenth century and displaced sorghum and millet over the following three hundred years, so completely that most people now assume it was always the staple. Sorghum survives in the ceremonial brewing of umcombotsi, which is a reminder of what the porridge used to be made from.

Ingredients

Porridge

  • 400 g white maize meal (coarse or medium)
  • 1.4 litres water

Seasoning

  • 1 tsp fine salt

To serve

  • 500 ml emasi (soured milk), or thick plain yoghurt let down with milk

Method

  1. Whisk 100 g of the maize meal into 300 ml of the cold water until completely smooth.
  2. Bring the remaining 1.1 litres of water to a rolling boil with the salt, then pour in the slurry, whisking, and cook for five minutes until it thickens to a loose porridge.
  3. Reduce the heat to its lowest, cover, and cook for ten minutes without stirring.
  4. Now add the remaining maize meal in small handfuls, beating hard with a wooden spoon after each until fully absorbed.
  5. Cover and cook on the lowest heat for a further fifteen to twenty minutes, beating the mass hard against the side of the pan every five minutes.
  6. It is ready when it is stiff enough to stand a spoon in and pulls away from the pan in one mass. Turn out onto a plate as a mound.
  7. Serve hot, torn off by hand, with a bowl of emasi alongside and a meat or vegetable relish.

Notes

White maize meal, not yellow and not cornflour. Yellow gives a different flavour and colour that southern Africans regard as animal feed; cornflour is pure starch and will not work at all. Emasi can be approximated with thick plain yoghurt let down with a little milk, or with proper buttermilk. The same dish under other names covers most of southern and central Africa: pap, sadza, nshima, ugali, oshifima.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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