#7 São Tomé and Príncipe
- Jen
- Oct 8, 2019
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
OK, well I know that I wrote every country on a piece of paper only a few months ago but when this one came out of the pan it felt like the first time I’d ever seen these words. Where the hell is this?! Caribbean? Oh, no, it’s not. Damn, no rum yet!
History
São Tomé and Príncipe is an island nation off the coast of Gabon, west Africa. There are two main islands: São Tomé and (guess!) Príncipe and the country is the smallest of ten Portuguese-speaking countries. It was discovered by the Portuguese on their global conquest in the 15th century and they found nobody living there. Easy win. The Portuguese realised that the volcanic soil on the islands would be excellent for growing cash crops, like sugarcane, so that’s what they did. They brought slaves over from mainland Africa to São Tomé to work the land and the island later became a massive slave trade centre for shipping slaves between west Africa and Brazil and the Caribbean.
São Tomé and Príncipe gained independence from Portugal in 1975 and Príncipe has been an autonomous region since 1995.
Food
Apart from cocoa beans, there aren’t really large quantities of anything else grown on the islands, which means that the country relies a lot on imports, a lot of which come from Portugal. Tropical fruits, such as bananas and papaya grow well and palm oil is also grown for domestic consumption. The main source of protein is fish but they also eat monkeys and bats (think we’ll have a fish dish!). They use coffee in cooking, which I was tempted to do for this blog, and, although I could find several coffee-based dinner recipes online, it wasn’t clear where in the world they were from. Instead, I’m going to make a dish using a controversial ingredient…
A popular dish on the island is calulu de peixe. This is a dish that’s sort of boomeranged between Africa and the Americas. The dish originated amongst the Angolan slave population in Brazil, taken there by the Portuguese, and because ST&P was a slave hub, it found its way to the islands.
It’s a simple fish and vegetable stew, cooked with...palm oil.
Palm oil
Before we all start panicking about my blog single-handedly destroying acres of orang-utan habitats let’s get some facts straight:
1. There are no orang-utans in Africa.
2. The majority (85%) of the world’s palm oil comes from Malaysia and Indonesia (hence the orang-utan crisis) but oil palm trees are not native to Asia; they are, in fact, native to Africa.
3. Palm oil has been used as a cooking oil in Africa for ages!
4. I’m not going to go into why the global palm oil industry is so evil, how many products we use daily that contain it or why we should be very picky about the corporations using palm oil we give our money to, but if this is all brand-new information to you, please Google the topic.
5. Boycotting palm oil altogether would negatively impact the world even more than continuing to consume it because other vegetable oils take up more land for production, resulting in increased deforestation. In addition, local communities farming oil palm would lose their livelihoods.
Palm oil, like coconut oil, is high in saturated fat and is solid at room temperature. Red palm oil contains carotenes, which give it its colour. Highly processed palm oil loses this nutritional component and is generally higher in saturated fat. Most of the palm oil we eat in packaged food is this highly processed variety.
I decided that if I could source some virgin red palm oil that I can trust to be genuinely sustainable then I’d get some and make calulu de peixe but if not then I’d make something else because the palm oil is a key component of the dish.
I ended up spending more than I would have liked to on one ingredient but I’m now the proud owner of unrefined, certified USDA Organic, Non-GMO Verified, Fair for Life, Palm Done Right red palm oil*. The air miles on this jar will be outrageous but Nutiva products are fair trade and environmentally friendly.
(*At the time of writing, absolutely nothing to do with this ST&P blog, I’m currently attempting to make baked carrot and parsnip crisps…because why do one task at a time when you can do multiple (rugby’s on in the background too)…I’ve used my new palm oil (with plenty salt and cumin seeds) because it has quite a carroty sort of taste that I think will go quite nicely…
…I was right. They’re really good! Slice the veg as thinly as possible, toss in melted palm oil and seasoning and bake on high until they’re about to burn.)
Calulu de peixe
In ST&P they tend to use dried fish for the stew. I did not. I marinated fresh cod in lemon, chilli and garlic for a few minutes, which causes denaturation of the proteins in the fish, in a similar way to drying the fish…I do not know what this means. Chemistry always baffled me at school.
The typical veg in this stew is Okra. Okra is native to and quite widespread in Africa and found its way to Brazil along with the people of Africa on board the slave ships. You can easily find Okra in the supermarket but I was unable to source any on this week’s Sainsbury’s shop so I chopped a courgette into fingers instead.
So, fry onions in the lovely carroty-coloured oil, put the marinated fish on top, layer with more onion, chopped fresh tomatoes, courg“okra”, veg stock, more yummy palm oil, cover and simmer. When it looks kinda cooked, throw in some chopped curly kale, simmer it a bit more, stir and it’s done! Easy.
What I’m finding so wonderful about these dishes I’m making is how simple some of the tastiest things are 😊
The overall taste was fairly predictable (predictably yummy) but I have to say, I think the red palm oil really did make this. The oil just gave it another depth of flavour that I wasn’t really expecting. The only thing I’d do differently next time would be using hotter chillis. I used those dweeby little red ones you get in the supermarket and they didn’t really do much. With a bit more of a kick it would definitely be a hot tropical island delight rather than the warm comforting bowl of stew on a cold night that I made it!
I should feel guilty for not serving this with something that it would traditionally be eaten with but all that flavoursome stew juice was just screaming out to be mopped up with a crusty French stick, and, I’ll be honest, I have no regrets. It was cracking. Only seven countries in and I’m already taking the European approach. We’ll call it fusion.
In the interests of being open and honest with my readers, Belize was the country that came out of the saucepan next but I have plans to go there in 2020 so it’s gone back in the pan and traded places with…LATVIA.
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