Angolan Recipes

Muamba De Galinha (Angolan Chicken Stew)

Muamba de galinha is the dish most often named as Angola's national one, and it earns the title by being the clearest single statement of what Angolan cooking is. Chicken marinated in garlic and paprika, seared in red palm oil, simmered with onion, tomato and hot pepper, thickened with okra and given body by squash. The palm oil is not a background ingredient. It is what turns the stew the deep orange that muamba is recognised by, and it carries a specific flavour that no other fat provides. Angolans call it dendem or red oil, and a muamba made with anything else is a chicken stew rather than a muamba. The name itself points somewhere older. Muamba refers to a family of dishes built on palm across Angola and the wider Congo basin, of which muamba de galinha is the chicken version and muamba de ginguba the groundnut one. The Portuguese in the name is only the galinha. It is eaten with funge, the cassava porridge, or with rice, and the version here serves it with cassava tossed in lemon and garlic, which is a contemporary treatment of a very old accompaniment.

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45 minMediumAngola

Recipe by Chef.donkey · Africook

Kizaca

Kizaca, also written kizaka or quizaca, is pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly with groundnuts until the leaves soften and the nuts break down into a thick, savoury sauce around them. It is among the most widely eaten dishes in Angola and one of the few that is vegetarian by default. Its composition tells a compressed version of Angolan history. Cassava is not indigenous to Angola; it arrived from Brazil, another Portuguese colony, and became so completely established that its leaves are now a national green. Palm oil, groundnuts and slow cooking are the local contribution. Angolan food is often described as Portuguese influence over African ingredients, and kizaca shows the arrangement is more complicated than that: the central ingredient is an import that has been African for centuries. It is normally eaten as an accompaniment to meat or fish rather than as the centre of a plate, and kizaka com peixe, made with fish, onions and tomato, is the most common form in Angola. Rice or chikuanga goes alongside. Angolan cooks make it in advance deliberately, because the flavour of cassava leaf and groundnut needs several hours together before it settles.

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EasyAngola

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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

Recipe by 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.

★★★★★Highest Rated

1 hr 30 minEasyAngola

Recipe by Nympha · Africook