Equatorial Guinea - home cooking

It took me a while to accept that this was going to happen. Firstly, that succotash was more than just a Looney Tunes reference. Secondly, that a dish popular in North America was the national dish of a West African nation.

Turns out, both are true. 

One thing that was fairly certain - there were no Equatorial Guinean restaurants in London. I did check to see if any London restaurants were offering succotash on their menus. To be honest, a couple were. My brief research flagged up a couple of seemingly high-end restaurants offering succotash as part of a starter. More like a succotash relish or accompaniment. And certainly more of a North American adaptation rather than African. So it was time to get back in the kitchen.

Quite how succotash became the national dish in Equatorial Guinea would likely be a complicated story. I admit I've tried to find some explanations online, and can only really come up with the likelihood that it was Spanish immigrants who brought the dish to these West African shores. Perhaps that's how the dish ended up in North America too. Anyway, I was cooking it now before someone could suggest it was just one big hoax and ruin this part of the project.

The dish is based around lima beans, corn and fresh herbs. I wasn't entire sure what lima beans were, and therefore how easy it was going to be to find some. So I was relieved to find that lima beans and butter beans are roughly one and the same. And my go-to supermarket stocked the latter. 

As for corn, I cut a corner here. The recipe I used mentioned fresh corn. Lots of it. The only corn I could find were fresh corn-on-the cobs. I couldn't even try and guess how many of those I would have needed to take a knife to in order to collect half a kilogram of fresh corn.

So I bought tins of sweetcorn. Go ahead and judge.

Preparation of the dish is largely simple, with a few intricacies which I'm sure actually make a big difference. Time wasn't really on my side this Sunday afternoon, and I'm not a fan of soaking beans for days on end either, so I flash soaked 400g of butter beans. By which I mean I boiled the beans for two minutes, removed from the heat, and left to soak for nearly one and a half hours. The beans were actually popping when boiling, which I guess was the beans suddenly expanding and popping out of the thick skin around the bean. This didn't have any negative side effect on the dish overall. It didn't get mushy.

I then drained and rinsed the beans, and boiled them again, this time with a clove of garlic, half an onion and some fresh thyme sprigs, for twenty minutes. Then I removed the onion and thyme (I couldn't find the garlic clove!), drained the beans but reserved 200ml of the liquid, and set the beans aside. 

The next part is optional. This would have been a vegetarian dish, were it not for the suggestion (non-traditional, I'd imagine) of adding crispy bacon to the dish. I was absolutely up for doing this. I fried three bacon rashers until very crispy, set these aside on some kitchen paper, and then fried a chopped sweet onion in the bacon fat. This is one of those small details which I think really added to the dish, and would have been missing completely had I decided not to use bacon at all. Which is a ridiculously obvious statement to make. What I mean is, aside from the bacon itself, frying the onion in the bacon fat added so much to the dish. Especially as sweet onion, by nature, isn't particularly flavoursome.

I then added around 500g of drained tinned sweetcorn and about 10 halved cherry tomatoes, followed by the cooked beans and the reserved cooking liquid.

At this point, as I could tell the beans were still a little hard - a side effect of the flash soaking, I imagine - I rapidly cooked the whole mixture. There was no risk of burning or dehydration as there was a good bit of liquid to play with. After about 10 minutes of that, I added a couple of tablespoons of butter, some chopped chives and dill and a tablespoon of red wine vinegar. Finally, a sprinkle of salt and pepper and the crisp bacon, crumbled. A good mix together, and the dish was good to serve.

I wrongly assumed that the dish would almost be like a soup, and had bought some bread as an accompaniment. It wasn't at all. It wasn't dry by any means, but there was certainly no excess liquid. In fact, it was perfect. Beans, vegetables and bacon in a luxurious but sparse buttery glazey gravy. That's the best way I can describe it.

Overall, it was a seriously enjoyable, very wholesome dish. The beans were still a little under-cooked in places - again, mostly due to technique (an overnight soak would get around this). Flavour wise, nothing really stood out too much over anything else. The butter was ever-present and very enjoyable. The bacon flavour was very much there, thanks to the bacon itself, but almost more so the fried sweet onions. The tomatoes and sweetcorn were almost refreshing - crisp, sweet and a lovely contrast to the mostly soft, carby beans.

This is a perfect, one-bowl complete meal which went down very well on this cold, winter night in London. Which is strange, as Equatorial Guinea isn't known for its cold winter nights. But I don't write the rules.