Chile Peppers

by Dave Dewitt

  Pili-pili (and its variant spellings) has become the de facto common term for the chile pepper in Africa. There are hundreds of other names for the chile peppers of Africa because of the sheer number of languages spoken on the continent. The Portuguese there call the chile pimento, the English refer to it as chilli and capsicum, the Arabic words for it are shatta and felfel, and the French word for chile is piment. Tribal names vary greatly: chile is mano in Liberia, barkono in northern Nigeria, ata in southern Nigeria, sakaipilo in Madagascar, pujei in Sierra Leone, and foronto in Senegal. All of these names can be confusing, as well as the hot sauces and spice mixtures made with them, but I will try to sort them out.

  FROM HARISSA TO BERBERE: THE HOT SAUCES

  A complex and powerful spice compound is the chile-based harissa, of Tunisian origin but found all over North Africa. Harissa sauce is a classic North African condiment, which combines cayenne or other dried hot red chiles with cumin, cinnamon, coriander, and caraway. It is extremely hot and is used as a condiment, a marinade, a basting sauce, and as a salad dressing. Harissa is often served on the side as a dipping sauce for grilled meats such as kebabs and is also served with couscous.

  A similar spice paste, essential in Ethiopian cooking, is called berbere, which is made with the hottest chiles available, plus up to eleven spices. It is served as a side dish with meat, or used as a coating for drying meats, and is an indispensable ingredient in the dishes known as wat, or w’et (depending on the transliteration), which are spicy, curry-like stews of lamb, beef, chicken, beans, or vegetables (never pork).

  Identical to berbere in terms of ingredients, awaze takes the paste concept into a new dimension by creating a thinner hot sauce from it. The paste is spread thin and dried in the sun, combined with more cinnamon, salt, cardamom, and cloves, and then ground to a fine powder. This powder is mixed with water and mashed with cooked garlic and onion to a thin consistency. As is typical with Ethiopian hot sauces, it is generally served over raw meats. Sometimes green chiles are used with basil to make a much milder version of awaze, but it’s still used over raw meats.

  Olives and harissa sauce, Tangier, Morocco. Photograph by Dave DeWitt.

  Captain Theophilus Conneau mentioned West African “palavra sauce,” which is the same as the palaver sauce. The name is borrowed from the Spanish palabra meaning “word” or “discussion,” and in English it specifically means a discussion with or among African tribes. “Its hot, pungent ingredients mingle in the pot as heated voices mingle in the excitement of a palaver,” writes Carol MacCormack, an anthropologist who studied the sauce-making techniques of the Sherbro tribe of southern Sierra Leone, where this sauce is called pla’sas. Red palm oil is a key ingredient in this sauce, as are chopped greens such as cassava leaves (called “callaloo” in the West Indies) or spinach. Locally grown leaves such as platto, bologi, and bitterleaf are often utilized.

  Among the Yoruba of West Africa, “meat is always cut fine to be cooked,” according to T. J. Bowen, author of Central Africa (1857). “Sometimes it is stewed, but it is usually made into palaver sauce which the Yorubas called obbeh, by stewing up a small quantity of flesh or fish, with a large proportion of vegetables, highly seasoned with onions and red pepper. Obbeh, with ekkaw or boiled yam, pounded or unpounded, is the customary diet of all classes, from king to slave.”

  In Ghana, “for a quick sauce, onions, peppers, tomatoes, and salt are ground together raw,” writes Lynn Bryden, an anthropologist, “mixed with a tin of mackerel or sardines in oil, and served with other ‘slices’ (slices of boiled vegetables—yam, plantain, cocoyam [taro], cassava) or kenkey (steamed fermented maize dough).” Bryden also writes about the importance of these kinds of stews at a nubililty [coming of age] ceremony of the Avatimes, a tribe living in the Togo hills. The girl sits on a low stool while her aunt from her father’s side places porridge and stew in front of her. Eager children are then called and they “wolf down the food.” Water is poured over their hands and falls into the empty food dish. The children are sent away and the father’s sister gives the girl this water “three times to drink.” I’m no anthropologist, but it seems to me that this ritual is the symbolic passing on—to the girl who is now ready for marriage and having children of her own—of the essence of feeding children.

  A famous African food based on a hot sauce is piri-piri, Mozambique’s “national dish.” The same word describes small hot dried red chiles; a sauce or marinade made with those chiles; and the recipes combining shrimp, chicken, or fish with the piri-piri sauces. Such fiery combinations are so popular in Beira and Maputo that piri-piri parties are organized. The dish has even been introduced into Lisbon, where it is served with considerably less chile heat. Laurens van der Post, the famed South African historian, describes the process of making the sauce:

  Of course, every cook in Mozambique had his own particular way of preparing piri-piri. I have chosen one provided by a Portuguese housewife of Mozambique. According to her instructions, one begins by squeezing out some lemons, passing the juice through a sieve, warming it in a pan, inserting peppers and chillies that must be red (and freshly picked, she emphasized). They are simmered on low heat for just five minutes. The mixture is then taken from the stove, drained of its juice and the peppers are pressed into a fine paste. A pinch of salt is added and the pounding continues until there are no lumps left in the pulp. The pulp is returned to the pan with the original lemon juice and further simmered while being constantly stirred. This then is the piri-piri sauce which can be eaten with steak, mutton, fowl, fish, and crustacean and always best I should say with rice of some kind to provide the exact civilising corrective to the pagan excitement of the sauce.

  As we’ve seen, some distinctive sauces sprang up from numerous collisions of cultures, but there were some hot sauce duplications and amalgamations. A perfect example is South Africa. With its culinary influences from England, the Netherlands, India, and Malaysia, it’s a place where sambals are not quite sambals and chutneys are blatjangs. South African food authority Renata Coetzee observes: “The Cape Malays are past masters at combining a variety of spices in one dish or at serving ‘hot’ dishes with a cool ‘sambal’ or, alternatively, hot chutney or pickles to add piquancy to bland foods.”

  Sambal oelek. Photograph by Geo Trinity. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

  Hot sauces take three forms in South Africa: sambals, blatjangs, and atjars. Because of the influence of the Cape Malays, the immigrants who first arrived as “indentured servants” from what is now Malaysia and Indonesia, there are the sambals. But these are not the original Malaysian and Indonesian sambals—they are more of a hot-chile paste, while according to South African food expert Hilda Gerber, “Cape Malays today [1949] understand the term sambal to be a grated vegetable or fruit, notably quince, apple, carrot, or cucumber, salted and seasoned with vinegar and chillies. The same vegetables are called slaai or salad when then are not grated but shredded, although the dressing may be the same.” Van der Post states that “no Malay feast is complete without a sambal of some kind.”

  Other sources reveal how sambals have come from far afield: “Sambal is a mixture of gherkins cut small, onions, anchovies, cayenne pepper, and vinegar,” explains a South African traveler known only as Lichtenstein. He adds: “The natives, the South-African-born colonists, commonly season these dishes with the green pods of cayenne pepper, some of which they have lying by during winter.” Hilda Gerber, author of Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays (1949), comments: “This condiment might colloquially be described as a hot favourite. Some make it thin enough to pour, others make it rather thick, but whatever its consistency, it must be ‘hot.’”

  The other two South African hot sauces are blatjangs and atjars, both of which are also served with curries and other main dishes. As with sambals, they had their origin in Java and were taken to South Africa by the Cape Malays. Blatjangs, though originally from Indonesia, are a South African version of In
dian chutneys, and some of the same spices appear in them. Blatjang “acquired its name from a prawn and shrimp mixture that was sun-dried, pounded in a wooden mortar, and shaped into masses resembling large cheeses,” writes Van der Post. “In this form it was imported to the Cape.” Blatjangs eventually evolved and were combined with European fruits and vegetables grown in South Africa. Van der Post notes: “But the importance of blatjang is not in its modern complexities but in the fact that it became for South Africa what Worcestershire sauce became for the English.” The South African poet and chef C. Louis Leipoldt describes it as “bitingly spicy, pungently aromatic, moderately smooth and a very intimately mixed association of ingredients.” The hot sauce is traditionally served with bobotie (see page 191).

  Curiously, blatjangs contain vinegar but are not thought of as pickles, while atjars have no vinegar but are referred to as a type of pickle. Atjars consist of vegetables and/or fruits that are pickled in oil with chiles and certain curry spices. “The Cape colonists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used a variety of atjars, as inventories show,” writes Hilda Gerber, who laments the loss of knowledge of local recipes. “Although a number of Malay women know how to make several kinds of atjar, only very few bother to do so. Most of them are satisfied to use the two varieties they can get without difficulty from the Indian shops, viz. green mango atjar and lemon atjar, and quite a large percentage of Malay women do not even know that other varieties can be made.”

  Van der Post describes his family’s atjar as “a wildly miscellaneous affair.” The Van der Post family combined as many as 20 miniature or immature vegetables from the garden, from “tiny cobs of corn” to “the youngest of cucumbers” and beans sliced thinly, cauliflower, carrots, apricots, peaches, and more. They were simmered together with many spices and garlic until the vegetables were tender. They were then sorted to remove any inferior pieces, and the remainder was pickled in the usual oil and spice mixture with some curry powder added. Is this a pickle? A hot sauce? A condiment? All three—as the liquid was often used as a dressing after the fruits and vegetables were eaten. The old-style, homemade atjars were a thing of the past as recently as 1945, going the way of homemade chutneys as housewives just bought the jarred kind. “We do not find it anymore,” laments C. Louis Leipoldt. “And, my goodness, do not come and tell me it is still made; that in every Afrikaans cookbook and in some English ones you will find recipes for its preparation . . . that kind of atjar has disappeared completely. It has melted away like snow on the Cederberg mountains in August.”

  Spice stall in Morocco. Photograph by Rick Browne. Used with permission.

  PUNGENT NORTH AFRICAN SPICE MIXTURES AND CURRIES

  “The North African housewife can choose from up to 200 different spices and herbs when she stops to replenish her supplies at a spice stall in the souks of the medinas,” observes African cookbook author Harva Hachten. This diversity is reflected in the unique spice mixture ras el hanout, which is prepared with 20 to 30 spices ranging from the familiar to the downright weird. Paula Wolfert, in her book Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, states that “it is incorrect to think of ras el hanout as curry powder by another name” because it lacks sufficient amounts (or any, in some cases) of cumin, coriander, fenugreek, and mustard. However, most versions of ras el hanout contain other major curry spices, such as turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, black pepper, and chiles, so let’s compromise and say that the mixture is a variation on curry powders. Some recipes for it call for using shiny green cantharides beetles called “Spanish fly,” which are reputed to have an aphrodisiac quality, and other recipes call for additional iffy ingredients like belladonna berries (don’t try this at home!), nigella (aka “black cumin” or “black onion seed”; it is neither) and orris root (a rhizome of an iris flower).

  Less controversial curry mixtures found in North Africa include the basic Tunisian tabil mixture of coriander, caraway, garlic, and crushed red chile; la kama, a Moroccan blend of black pepper, turmeric, ginger, cumin, and nutmeg; zahtar, a combination of sesame seeds, ground sumac, and powdered thyme; and qalat daqqa, or Tunisian five-spice powder, which is another simple mixture—similar to a basic masala—of five curry spices, with cloves, black peppercorns, and nutmeg providing the dominant flavors.

  The most famous North African curries, or curry-like dishes if you prefer, served from Morocco to Egypt, are called tajines, and they are named after the earthenware tajine pot in which they are cooked. Just about any meat—chicken, pigeon, mutton, beef, goat, and even camel—can be made into a tajine with the exception of pork. The meat is usually cubed, and, according to Harva Hachten, writing in Kitchen Safari: A Gourmet’s Tour of Africa, “The cooking liquid is the secret of a tajine’s tastiness. This is usually a combination of water and butter or oil (characteristically, olive oil) and seasonings to suit what’s being cooked.” The long cooking time allows the ingredients to become very tender, and the cooking liquid to reduce to a thick, savory sauce.

  Tajines in a pottery shop in Morocco. Photograph by Jafri Ali. Wikimedia. Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

  Chicken Tagine is what my wife and I were served in a restaurant near the Kasbah in Tangier, Morocco, and I remember it as being mildly spicy. Unfortunately, we were on a group-tour day trip from Spain and lunch had been preordered for everyone, so there was no opportunity to order from the menu. The visit to the Kasbah had been extremely unpleasant as we were constantly hounded by hawkers trying to sell us trinkets. Then at lunch the restaurant servers confiscated our water bottles and gave us new ones, from which I contracted giardia. Fortunately my wife did not. If readers wish to visit Tangier, I advise skipping the Kasbah and drinking beer instead of water.

  In 1902, Budgett Meakin, a traveler in North Africa, described a recipe for the preparation of couscous made with maize that involved mutton curried with ginger, pepper, nutmeg, allspice, turmeric, and saffron. The mutton was sautéed in a tajine with butter and onions, the spices were added along with freshly chopped parsley, marjoram, and cilantro, and to the mixture water was added for stewing. When the meat was nearly done, a steamer filled with couscous was placed on top of the tajine and the rising steam finished the cooking. Meakin, writing in The Moors, notes that “a specialty of their kitchens is . . . the use made of raisins, dates, etc. in their meat stews, with most excellent results. After kesksoo [couscous], their stews are their strong point, and right tasty and tender they are, whatever the age of the creature supplying the meat, as they needs must be, when they have to be carved with the fingers and thumb of one hand.” He also comments that the Moors use some red pepper in their dishes but don’t like their curry meals really hot. Not so the Nigerians and other West Africans.

  WEST TO EAST: CURRIES GET HOTTER

  Over in West Africa, particularly the former British colony of Nigeria, the curries are distinguished by an extra infusion of hot chiles. As Ellen Wilson, author of A West African Cookbook, observes: “Learning to eat West African food means learning to enjoy [chile] pepper.” She adds: “West African dishes can be searing or simply warm, but it is noticeable that the [chile] pepper never conceals the other ingredients; in fact, it seems to enhance them.”

  Another distinguishing characteristic of Nigerian curries is that they are served with an inordinate number of accompaniments. In addition to the usual chutneys and raisins and shredded coconuts, the Nigerians offer as many as 25 condiments, including chopped dates, diced cucumber, diced citrus fruits, ground dried shrimp, diced mangoes and papayas, peanuts, grapes, fried onions, chopped fresh red chiles, and bananas. “Nigerians and old African hands,” notes Harva Hachten, “spoon out a portion of everything so their plates become a mound of curry and rice completely hidden by a patchwork of color and tastes.”

  Packaging sundried tomatoes and peppers in Hunkuyi, Kaduna State, Nigeria. After the rainy season, fresh tomatoes, bell peppers, and Scotch bonnet peppers are preserved by spreading them on the ground to dry under the sun. Phot
ograph by Fatima Bukar. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  The famous African traveler and adventurer, Sir Richard Burton, writing in Wanderings in West Africa from Liverpool to Ferdinand Po, volume 2 (1863), maintains that “‘Palm-oil chop’ is the curry of the Western coast, but it lacks the delicate flavour which turmeric gives, and suggests coarseness of taste.” Thus the “chop” is another African “almost curry.” Burton continues: “After some time Europeans begin to like it, and there are many who take home the materials to Europe. Besides palm-oil, it is composed of meat or fowl, boiled yam, pepper, and other minor ingredients. I always prefer it with rice; pepper, however, is the general fashion.” In the book, Burton uses the generic term “pepper” to mean both chile peppers and malagueta peppers, so he probably means here that both peppers were used in the chop.

  Here’s what Sir Richard Burton was eating in Uganda in 1858:

  Dinner was an alternation of fish and fowl, game and butchers’ meat being rarely procurable and the fish were in two extremes, either insipid and soft, or so fat and coarse that a few mouthfuls sufficed; most of them resembled the species seen in the seas of Western India, and the eels and small shrimps recalled memories of Europe. The poultry, though inferior to that of Unyanyembe, was incomparably better than the lean stringy Indian chicken. The vegetables were various and plentiful, tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potatoes, yams, and several kinds of beans, especially a white haricot, which afforded many a puree; the only fruit procurable was the plantain, and the only drink—the toddy [liquor] being a bad imitation of vinegar—was water.