I won't get all the names right the first time around but I wanted to capture some of the unique flavors I have been able to find in Mozambique. There are some similarities to neighboring South Africa (a meat-first, ask questions later sort of place where open flame and smoke dominate cooking styles) and bordering Tanzania (where tropical ingredients meet low income staples like corn meal and beans). The real x factors for Mozambique is the long coast line and some choice exposure to Indian culinary influence. Some of the distinct meals I have been privileged to include:
1. Fried Calamari: This is not your fancy sports bar's battered and fried squid rings. This is the tentacles and fillet-sized side of a large squid soaked in lemon juice and char grilled on an open flame. The mix of char, salt, and lemon with the mild squid gave new life to a ingredient that rarely thrills me.
2. Xia (Shia): I may be butchering this name, but this is an important staple across the country, particularly poorer areas where we didn't get to explore. This consists of rough corn meal and water stirred together until it becomes a doughy porridge. Each country in eastern Africa claims a version of this dish and each claims their version the best (despite identical construction). Xia is often served as the starch (sort of a cheap rice replacement) which to pour stew-like dishes over.
3. Matapa: This is the country's most cited original culinary creation. It is a thick stew of spinach and coconut milk prepared with crab and white fish. A mild curry is used to spice the dish. Every ingredient is a good one and I ordered this dish a few times to see differences in flavor and preparation. While I like it, I can't say it's my favorite. The spinach, the coconut, the crab, and even the curry all have very subtle flavors and tend to just blur each other for me instead of combining into a particularly fantastic dish.
4. Kakana: This is a bitter green in some way like cooking with a tea leaf combined with a bay leaf. The big difference though is that it breaks down a bit and the whole leaf (or chopped up bits) are eaten unlike what those flavor comparisons suggest. The English translations on menus often called the Kakana, collared greens, but it was way more bitter. I'm not having any luck finding the name of the dish that notably served it. It started with a C, so lets just go with that. The dish took on the consistency of hot potato salad but was comprised of a different starchy root vegetable similar to a yucca. Kakana was also strewn throughout the thick stew. The yucca and kakana were bound together with coconut milk, curry, and ground peanuts. There was enough sweet in this dish to counter balance the bitter and I thought it was one of the best we had.
5. Peanut Flour- A lot of baked good substitute ground peanuts for wheat flour. This creates many dense nutty breads. In several cases we also found ground sweet corn subbed in for flour. These breads were sweet without sugar and moist with tons of eggs. They were one of my other favorite things to grab when they showed up at restaurants. One evening saw our table get served 12 pieces of eggy cornbread. I ate 7 of the pieces before I guiltily was called out by Kulsum.
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