Cape Verde - home cooking

Although I do pride myself on my geographical knowledge, especially when it comes to countries and borders, I wasn't initially sure if Cape Verde was going to be the next installment of our restaurants project or not. I had never been sure if the territory was an autonomous country in its own right, or a dependency of another. 

But it didn't take much research to realise that Cape Verde is indeed a nation, and as such has a national dish. It also didn't take much research to ascertain that there are no restaurants in London that cater for Cape Verde's cuisine. So it was back to the kitchen.

During the aforementioned research one uniquely national dish popped up again and again. Cachupa - a stew of corn, beans and meat. Going a little deeper than that, cachupa rica added a few more ingredients than the simpler version of the meal. All ingredients that sounded bloody good to me.

There are many variations of even this version of the dish, and I think there is also permitted use of creative licence when it comes to adding even more. I ended up using a recipe of a Cape Verdean student in London, guessing that this was as authentic as I was going to get.

The first ingredient I attempted to buy was dry corn or hominy. No luck. So I took the easy way out and went for sweetcorn, to add later in the process rather than cook with from scratch. I used dry kidney beans as red beans. Also in the meal was olive oil, onions, bay leaves, vegetable stock, garlic, chorizo, pork, chilli powder, potatoes and a sweet potato, white cabbage, carrots and tomatoes.

As I used dry beans, and bought them on the day of cooking, I flash soaked them for an hour to soften them up. After sauteing one chopped onion with a bay leaf I added the beans (and usually the corn) followed by one litre of both vegetable stock and water. This cooked for 40 minutes.

While this was on the go, in another big pot I heated four tablespoons of olive oil and to this added the other chopped onion, four crushed garlic gloves and one bay leaf. Once the onions started to soften I added one sliced ring of chorizo, half a kg of diced pork, and a tablespoon of chilli powder. This all cooked together on a low heat for around 20 minutes, stirring often as the mixture was quite dry.

Both pots were ready at pretty much the same time. One was added to the other, and at this point the rest of the ingredients - 4 small potatoes (quartered), 1 sweet potato (quartered) half a cabbage (sliced), 2 carrots (sliced), and 2 tomatoes (peeled and sliced) - were added, mixed together thoroughly and cooked for another 20 minutes. This is also the point where I added a drained tin of sweetcorn.

A word of advice. Use the biggest pot you have for this. The recipe used here was to feed six, and I would even say that was a bit of an underestimation.

When serving, I was careful to leave as much liquid in the pot as possible as ideally it should be served on a plate. And it was hugely enjoyable. I always want to use the word "wholesome" when it comes to cooking a stew like this, and wholesome is a good word to describe it. I love cooking with rich items like chorizo, as the flavour really soaks into everything else in the pot in the best way possible.

The potatoes added some real substance to the meal, as did the pork. The beans and corn made this a thoroughly filling meal. I'm still not really sure what bay leaves do in cooking, and the chilli powder seemed to have negligible effect. Still, this was a fantastic dinner that also became lunch a couple of days later.

Elle also enjoyed the meal, but it contain three things that she doesn't really eat - kidney beans, chorizo and carrot. She gave it a good go though, and discarded only the kidney beans. She actually was complimentary about the chorizo such is the positive effect the spicy sausage has during the cooking process.