Casamance Stew

This is another recipe that I downloaded from a recipe archive before the Web existed. It's different from the pork and tomatillo stew I made earlier this week in a few interest ways, though. First, because of it's much more unusual name it managed to almost fully colonize it's namespace on the web; all but one "casamance stew" you'll find online is this recipe. Second, I was able to definitely track it back to its origin. This is a variation on a recipe from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook printed in the October 24, 1990 issue of the New York Times. And third, there is no indication that anyone other than I has ever actually cooked it. Not one review, not one comment and the biggest change anyone has made in the recipe is adding paragraph breaks. OK, that's not true; one guy suggests a parsley garnish.

A little research that I really should have done beforehand reveals that Casamance is a region on the south coast of Senegal and that this stew is actually a tinkered up version of poisson yassa. And while I'm sure the good folks in the Moosewood Collective meant well, the yassa recipes look a lot better and there's one change that really screws up this recipe. Let's see if you can see it without prompting.

Ingredients:

Marinade:
1/2 cup fresh lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce (this is clearly a substitute for Maggi seasoning so I used that instead. Click on the Senegalese tag for more info on Maggi seasoning.)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
3 cloves minced garlic
2 or more jalapeno chiles, seeded, minced

Everything else:
1 1/2 pounds monkfish or other firm fish fillets (I used whiting. According to my notes on the recipe, I used sea bass the first time around.)
4 cups sliced onions
2 cups sweet potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 teaspoon peanut oil,
1 chopped red bell pepper
salt to taste

1. Combine marinade ingredients (1st 7 items).

2. Rinse the fish well and cut into serving size pieces. Layer about half the onion slices in a glass baking dish. Pour some marinade over them. Then add fish and rest of onions, pour marinade over them. Cover and refrigerate overnight or all day.

3. When ready to cook, set the fish aside. Pour marinade off the onions and set aside. Cover cubed sweet potatoes with cool, salted water, bring to a boil then simmer until just barely tender.

4. Meanwhile, in heavy pan, gently saute onions in peanut oil for 15 minutes. Add red bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. Combine onion, bell pepper with sweet potatoes and marinade and simmer 20 minutes.

5. While vegetables simmer, briefly broil or saute fish til lightly browned on both sides.

6. Add fish to simmering vegetables and continue to cook 15 minutes more. Salt to taste.

Serve in wide shallow bowls on steaming rice or millet.



Did you see the problem there? Someone changed the sensible hour marination to a full day. If you have much cooking experience you'll realize that a day in vinegar and lemon juice is going to do some serious pickling to that fish. And if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that's precisely why I cooked this. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that the recipe author knew something I didn't and what looked like a step that would ruin the dish would instead make it something unique and wonderful. I really should have known better.

The fish was badly overcooked chemically before any actual cooking that the recipe calls for. And even if it needed cooking, browning was clearly not going to happen as the fish was waterlogged from its lengthy soak. All the attempt achieved was prompting the fillets to break apart. The 15 minutes of extra cooking time was out of the question.

It's really a shame as, setting the fish's texture aside, the flavor combination is unusual, interesting and not bad at all. The tart sauce brightens up the savory onions and peppers and balances the sweetness of the sweet potato. My salvage attempt on the dish was to treat the fish like salt cod and break it up into chewy flakes. I found that the sauce gets caught up in the flakes so it's more of a hash than a stew at this point and each bite tastes mainly of fish and caramized onion moistened by the sauce. It really tones down the overwhelming vinegariness of the sauce and if the fish didn't taste like canned tuna it would be pretty good.

Doesn't mean I'm going to make it again, though. Next yassa I make is likely to be this one which looks to be different in some rather interesting ways.

mafé - groundnut tomato stew

If you watched Top Chef this week you'll have seen one of the judges, Chef Tom Colicchio, repeatedly disparaging one dishes' combination of tomatoes and peanut butter as if he had no idea that it's a traditional West African combination (as traditional as an African combination of two new world plants can be, anyway). The chef who made it was clearly going for a standard chicken in peanut sauce--she served it over couscous so she knew the African origins and didn't just stumble on recipe independently--but if she explained that the fault lay in the preparation of the dish and not the conception, it didn't make it to air.

That's a problem I've had myself. I mean preparing a peanut-tomato dish, not malicious reality show editors making me look like a jerk. I've tried it a few different times and I've never come up with something worth eating. Colicchio's ignorance and/or lousy attitude was sufficient impetus for me to give it another shot.

I found a lot of different variations on the basic idea on-line, but I settled on this recipe for the Senegalese version, mafé, mainly because it hasn't been adjusted for American kitchens and sensibilities so I could do that myself.

I really wanted to use mutton or maybe goat but I've settled on buying my vegetables at Whole Foods in the CSA off season for lack of a better choice and their in-house butcher is more focused on semi-prepared meals for harried professionals than on offering a decent selection of meats or cuts. They didn't have any pork belly either so that dish is going to have to wait until I make a trip to Publix or maybe order something through the mail if I don't like the looks of what they've got. On the other hand Whole Foods does carry marrow bones so that should be a nice meal (and a post) some time soon. Anyway, I settled on beef given the choices offered. For vegetables, I've got a sweet potato and a carrot that should suit and my CSA yukina savoy survived all my refrigerator troubles fairly unscathed.

For the cooking method, I've discussed the better way to make stew in a Western kitchen (browning the meat and then a low slow braise in a 300 degree oven) before. You didn't get the full story then because that was a simple stew without any vegetables. Adding vegetables complicates things because they don't all take the same time to cook. For this recipe, I browned the beef, removed it from the pot, browned an onion and a couple jalapenos, returned the beef and stirred in two Tablespoons of tomato paste (I like the sort that comes in a tube) and a couple handfuls of roughly chopped cherry tomatoes. That would be two standard sized tomatoes if I could find any that taste anything like an actual tomato. And that goes into the 300 degree oven.




After an hour the tomatoes and beef juices have formed a rather nice sauce. The low heat keeps temperatures below boiling so it doesn't thicken and dry up. I stirred in the sweet potato and carrot and returned the pot to the oven.



After another half hour I added the yukina savoy.

After twenty more minutes I added a cup of fresh(ish)-ground unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter and enough water to thin the sauce out a bit. The original recipe says it's done now, but I put it back in the oven for ten minutes to let the flavors blend a little. Oh, and I should mention that the original recipe calls for Maggi sauce. From what I can dig up, that's an all-purpose sauce made from vegetable protein that tastes something like soy sauce. Whole Foods didn't carry it, but they did have a bottle of another brand of vegetable protein sauce at the salad bar. It seemed somewhere between soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to me. I used just a little soy sauce in the mafé and, as I neglected to replace the Worcestershire after the big refrigerator melt-down, some Pickapeppa sauce which tastes surprisingly similar considering its complete lack of fermented fish.

So how did it taste? Like peanut butter. The one cup I added walked all over the other flavors. The tomato had cooked down, mellowed and blended with the other flavors over the two hours of cooking so it had no chance against the peanut butter. Stews generally taste better the second day so I'm hopeful the situation will improve, but for now it's one more failure in my peanut-tomato recipe history.


OK, it's tomorrow. The overnight flavor-melding doesn't seem to have helped much, but on the bright side I was able to get my hands on some Maggi sauce. I think the comparison to soy sauce must be more by way of use than flavor. There is a slight resemblance but Maggi sauce has smoky, vinegary and meaty notes you don't find anywhere in soy. I can see why it's a staple in West Africa as it goes beautifully with peanuts. Mixing in a generous amount gives a result something like satay peanut sauce. I think it salvaged the dish and the lack of it at Whole Foods was probably why the chef who made peanut chicken on Top Chef ended up in the losers' circle.

Something Suitably Seasonal

I wanted to do something Thanksgivingy this week, but turkey ice cream was a bit too far. That left me with cranberry sherbet or candied sweet potato ice cream. There are plenty of recipes for both out there. Too many for cranberries, I thought, for it to be worth making (for any other reason that I really like cranberries. And I don't). So I went with sweet potatoes. It was hard finding a recipe that was what I really wanted; the traditional Thanksgiving side-dish in ice cream form. Most used sweet potatoes from a can so those were out. Others were Caribbean with coconut and rum flavors I wasn't looking for. A lot of others were just sweet potato ice cream without the candying aspect I wanted. Specifically, none had marshmallows. That was important to me for the effect I was going for.

Now keep in mind that, as an east coast Jewish boy, I find the concept of marshmallows in a side dish not quite right. I consider candied sweet potatoes, green bean casserole and any sort of hot dish to be intimidatingly exotic foreign food. I don't think I've ever had either of the latter two. I've had the down south version of sweet potatoes, but not the full-on stick-of-butter, quart-of-sugar, bag-of-marshmallows Midwestern version.

So that's what I wanted to make, then stick in a blender, mix with some cream and throw in a churn. Lots of recipes out there for that, too, but I wimped out on the most traditional versions and went with this one from Whole Foods' website. I think it is approximating the Midwestern version I wanted without focusing so strongly on the sugar as some of the other recipes did. It also doesn't include any maple syrup which I hesitate to use in a recipe that's going to freeze.

If I were just going to make sweet potatoes for myself, I'd probably go with this New Orleans recipe which looks pretty close to the great sweet potato pone I had at Gullah Cuisine.

I didn't make a lot of adjustments to the Whole Foods recipe other than dividing it by four to get a reasonable amount of it for my purposes. I did want to add a bit of citrus as a lot of other recipes used orange juice or zest. I didn't have either on hand, but I did have a tangerine to zest and some orange-pineapple juice. I just used a pinch of one and a splash of the other; I didn't want those to be major aspects of the final flavor. I also punched up the spices (the, now getting a bit tired, trio of cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger) to compensate for the flavor-dampening of cold temperatures.

The final result looked like this. I guess that's what it's supposed to look like. There wasn't a picture. I let it cool, picked off whatever marshmallows hadn't fully melted (for re-adding later), and poured it into the blender. My plan was to blend it smooth and then add it to this recipe. That was the most straightforward recipe I could fine. Really, I could have just made some of my standard ice cream base without a recipe, but I guess I'd rather gamble that Oprah hired a good food editor than on my own ability to guestimate the right ratios. You'll notice that Oprah's recipe is called "Candied Sweet Potato Ice Cream," but it isn't candied at all; They just add brown sugar to ice cream base. Not good enough for me, so I substituted in a pound of real candied sweet potatoes (with the spices Oprah was missing), reversed the 2:1 milk to cream ratio, and added some marshmallows.

I probably should have used a food processor instead of a blender for the sweet potatoes, because they just wouldn't blend. I kept adding more of the cream until I didn't have enough left to make a custard base with. It was thick enough that I think the eggs won't be missed. It's not like the recipe needed the extra fat, anyway.

Most of the marshmallows melted into the potatoes so I baked up a bunch more. These got crispy instead of gooey so I'm curious how they'll be in the final ice cream.

In the churn, the mix didn't freeze in the usual way. Usually, a layer freezes onto the inside of the bucket that needs to be scraped off to mix in and thicken the rest of the mix. This time, the whole mass thickened up pretty quickly and the outside layer was thicker and gooier, but not really solid. All that starch, I suppose. The flavor ended up hard to distinguish from pumpkin pie, but I got hints that it would change a bit when it ripened.

Those disturbing-looking things at the bottom of the picture there are toasted marshmallows not severed fingertips, by the way.

The final result has a lovely presentation with the pastel orange dotted with blobs of white delineated in dark brown. The texture is a little gritty, but that can't be helped. The marshmallows retained their foamy gooey texture even frozen, at least in my non-industrial strength freezer. The freezer at work may do a more thorough job. However, it is important not to let it melt as it turns into a fairly nasty mush instead of the puddle normal ice cream turns into. The flavor is milder than I'd like, but the sweet potatoes are distinct and clearly not pumpkin. And the marshallows are notably toasty. On the whole, I think I'll call this a success. Next time, I'll do it more Southern with molasses and pecans.