We have a board game called Monkey Bingo, which, as the name suggests, is like bingo, but instead of using numbers it uses monkeys. There are 64 monkeys in total, ranging from the well-known (e.g. gorilla) to the more obscure (e.g. Humboldt’s woolly monkey). This game became one of Baby Mash’s favourite activities during the 2020 lockdown, as he loved matching the little monkey cards to the big board of monkeys. By the age of 18 months he could name pretty much all of the monkeys, which of course gave us great confidence that he was a genius. His favourites were the aye-aye and the Atlantic titi.
One of the other monkeys – in the ‘more obscure’ category – was the Gabon talapoin.
Until a few weeks ago, this was pretty much our only encounter with Gabon, other than maybe being aware of it from secondary school geography or the odd Sporcle quiz about African nations. In case anyone reading this is equally ignorant, we can tell you that Gabon is on the central west coast of Africa, is home to a range of wildlife, is known for the Oklo reactor zones (the only known natural nuclear fission reactor on Earth), and has a national language of French – hence the influence on the name of its national dish, poulet nyembwe.
The recipe for poulet nyembwe required another visit to the African Supermarket to pick up an ingredient we’d never heard of before: palm base. Also known/labelled as palm soup base, palm cream, palm nut cream, palm nut soup or possibly various other permutations, this tinned ingredient is made by pounding palm nuts to extract the pulp. We’ve mentioned before that we actively try to avoid buying palm oil products, and we do admit that buying this product probably takes us two steps backward in that regard. There’s not really any justification other than the fact that there wasn’t an obvious a substitution as there is for palm oil itself, and we wanted to honour the traditional dish.
Poulet nyembwe
Ingredients
(we doubled these because a 2lb chicken isn’t worth bothering with, if you can even find one!)
6oz palm base
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt
1 clove garlic, crushed
3 spring onions, sliced thinly
1 2lb chicken, cut into pieces
Rice, to serve
Method
1. Put the palm base, cayenne pepper, black pepper, salt, garlic and spring onions in a large saucepan over medium heat and stir to combine.
2. Add the chicken, cover and reduce heat to low.
3. Simmer for 1 1/2 hours or until tender, adding water if necessary.
4. Serve with rice.
Serves 4-6
Well, it doesn’t get much simpler than this! After making quite a few fiddly dishes recently, we were very happy to move on to one that just involved throwing a bunch of stuff into a pot and letting it do its thing. And thankfully, we also enjoyed eating it. The palm base was very oily, but not to the point of being unpleasant, and the dish had a nice nutty flavour. Baby Mash didn’t agree, but that’s no surprise. The broccoli and cauliflower weren’t really part of it, we just had them left over from the day before so thought we might as well eat them.
So, all we knew was the Gabon talapoin, but now we know about a tasty dish too!
Good Food on Bad Plates 