Recettes Angola

Cabrito (Goat Meat Stew)

Cabrito is Angolan goat stew, cooked slowly and built on wine and fortified wine rather than the palm oil or tomato base most West African stews use. Goat is central to Angolan eating, and the eastern region is where it is raised, enough to supply the country and to sell across the borders. It carries an occasion weight that other meats do not: at celebrations, graduation parties and holidays, a goat dish on the table is what people go for first. The Portuguese influence is what makes the stew unusual on this continent. Red wine, brandy and sherry all go into it, and the long slow cooking that follows breaks down a cut that would otherwise be tough while the alcohol reduces to something concentrated and savoury. Four centuries of Portuguese colonial presence left this kind of cooking embedded in Angolan food, alongside the indigenous techniques. The word cabrito means kid goat in Portuguese, and younger animals are the preference, more tender, less strongly flavoured. **Contains alcohol.** Most cooks off during the long simmer, but not all of it.

MediumAngola

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Muamba Chicken (Muamba De Galinha)

Muamba is a family of palm based dishes across Angola and the Congo basin, and the chicken version is the one most often named as Angola's national dish. Chicken is simmered in palm oil with onion, garlic, tomato and hot pepper, thickened with okra, and served over rice or with funge, the cassava porridge. This particular version takes a path towards the Congo. Peanut butter goes in alongside the palm oil, which is a Congolese and Central African treatment more closely associated with moambe than with the Luandan preparation, and the result is heavier and nuttier than the Angolan version that relies on palm oil and okra alone. Both are legitimate. Muamba names a method rather than a single fixed recipe, and it changes as it crosses the region. The palm oil is what holds all the versions together. It is pressed from the fruit of the oil palm, which is indigenous to West and Central Africa, and it gives the dish its deep orange colour and a flavour that no other fat provides. Angolans call it dendem. Whatever else varies between one muamba and the next, a version made without palm oil is a chicken stew and not a muamba, which is the one point on which nobody in the region disagrees.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 30 minEasyAngola

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Chikuanga (Cassava Bread)

Chikuanga, also called kwanga, is fermented cassava pounded to a dense paste, wrapped and cooked into a firm loaf that is sliced and eaten with stews. It is made across Angola and the Congo basin, and the source associates it particularly with northeastern Angola. The long soak at the start is the whole process, and it is not a convenience step. Cassava is soaked for two full days at minimum, during which it ferments, and that fermentation is what makes it safe. Raw cassava contains cyanogenic glycosides which release cyanide, and soaking, fermenting and cooking are the traditional sequence developed over centuries to remove them. This is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a food processing technique that exists for a reason people worked out long before anyone could explain the chemistry. Longer soaking gives a softer, more sourly fermented result. Traditionally the finished paste is wrapped in banana or marantaceae leaves before its final cooking, and the leaves flavour it as it steams. The source's method substitutes cling film and string, which works but loses that. Where leaves are available they are worth using. The source calls Angola the Democratic Republic of Angola, which is not its name, the country is the Republic of Angola. Kwanga is also strongly associated with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which may be where the confusion arose.

2 hr 45 minHardAngola

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Catatos (Angolan Fried Caterpillars)

Catatos are dried caterpillars fried with garlic, onion, peppers and tomato. They are an Angolan dish, eaten with rice or funge and hot sauce, and they are entirely ordinary food there. Edible caterpillars are a serious food source across Central and Southern Africa, not a novelty. The mopane worm, the caterpillar of the emperor moth that feeds on mopane trees, supports a substantial harvesting and trading economy across Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and South Africa, and related species are gathered and dried across Angola and the Congo basin. They are seasonal, they are dried for storage, and they are traded in markets by the sack. The texture, when cooked properly, is soft inside with a crisp exterior, and the comparison people most often reach for is prawns. The dried caterpillars are rehydrated first, which is what the initial soaking is for. Africa has a long and unbroken tradition of eating insects that Europe and North America are only now rediscovering under the heading of alternative protein. It is worth stating plainly that this is established food with established techniques, not an experiment. The source names a specific seasoning cube brand, which has been described generically here.

45 minEasyAngola

Recette de Nympha · Africook