#9 Cape Verde
- Jen
- Feb 3, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Well here we are again, on a small, Portuguese-speaking island to the west of mainland Africa. It’s quite nice to dream of sunshine holidays on palm tree beaches on a grizzly day like today.
Geography
The Republic of Cape Verde, or the Portuguese Cabo Verde as it is officially known, is an archipelago of 10 islands (see below). Just like São Tomé and Príncipe, where we dined two countries ago, Cape Verde was uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century and, like ST&P, it gained independence from Portugal in 1975.
Here’s a hand-drawn map of Cape Verde, coloured with my Bic Kids colouring pencils that I actually use fairly regularly in my grown-up engineering job. I had a slow Tuesday evening!
The islands are a very popular holiday destination thanks to their year-round sunshine, white sandy beaches and excellent wind surfing spots. Some of the waters around the islands are a big game fisherperson’s paradise and your friendly hotel staff will gladly book you onto a boat trip to go fishing for massive blue marlin, yellow fin tuna, grouper, swordfish and snapper. There’s seafood dishes galore to choose from in the hotels and restaurants.
Food
The national dish of Cape Verde is cachupa, a stew made from hominy, beans, vegetables such as plantains or sweet potatoes, and pork or Portuguese-style sausage such as chouriço (similar to Spanish chorizo) or linguiça, a thinner, spicier, garlickier sausage. Each island has its own variation. It came about when Portuguese settlers started growing vegetables from the Americas. There are two types: cachupa rica (rich – veg and meat) and cachupa pobre (poor – veg only). It’s cooked at weekends and parties and leftovers are often eaten for breakfast with a fried egg, sausage or mackerel.
Cook the World cereal grain lesson #2: hominy. Hominy comes either tinned or dried and is corn kernals that have been processed to give them a chewy sort of texture. It’s used lots in Mexican cooking and is the base for grits. I’m not sure that it’s readily available in UK supermarkets so I got myself a dried bag from Prime.
Pasteis con peixe are fried pastries, or pastels, filled with fish. They’re a popular Cape Verdean snack and I think also popular in coastal regions of mainland Africa. I’ve definitely enjoyed a salt cod version in São Paulo, Brazil: very good with a glass of cold beer. In Cape Verde, they’re often filled with tuna, but white fish is also used.
A popular dessert is papaya jelly served with goats cheese: doce de papaya com queijo de cabra – little Portuguese lesson for you all there. My attempt at this was a total disaster so I can’t comment on how it's supposed to taste. Instead of a delicate jelly I created lumps of really bad papaya-flavoured toffee and wrote off a saucepan in the process. I ended up having to eat the goat’s cheese purchased for this blog with some of Mum’s (homemade of course) Christmas hamper chutney; not at all Cape Verdean.
Grogue
I always thought that ‘grog’ was just pirate chat for rum but it turns out that ‘grogue’ is an actual drink! It’s a type of rum made from sugarcane and is from Cape Verde.
Dinner & breakfast
After the papaya fail, my next roll of the dice was Friday night cachupa pobre, followed by cachupa frita (fried) as post-gym gains on Saturday morning, rica-ed up a bit with a fried egg and chorizo (because even though chorizo es español, I think, as this is peasant food, the idea is to use whatever you have to hand and my fridge is rarely without chorizo).
For an authentically Cape Verdean flavour I got my sustainable palm oil out again (off of the ST&P blog)…I’m pretty pleased to have a valid reason to use some more of my £16 jar of oil to be honest! I sautéed some onion and garlic and stirred in some paprika. Chunks of squash, potato, haricot beans, pre-soaked hominy and shredded cabbage went in, followed by a few freshly chopped tomatoes. I then poured over some stock, covered and let it do its thing for an hour.
Cachupa was great! I’m really glad I left the chunks of potato and squash quite big as it made it feel really hearty. The flavours were simple without being plain, which is what peasant food is about: well-executed simplicity. I can see why you need the processed hominy rather than regular corn because it has a really nice chewiness to it, which mixes up the texture a bit. And SUCH a cheap meal. Bowl of that on a cold January night: win.
For breakfast: fry off some chorizo, followed by the leftover cachupa until it’s reheated and nicely infused with the chorizo oili. Oh, and don’t forget the fried egg because no weekend brunch is complete without an egg.
Next out of the saucepan is…get very excited…CHINA!
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