Cuisine Spotlight: Aswad Salad
We are returning to our cuisine spotlight this month taking a closer look at the lynchpin of our vegan feasts, Aswad Salad. First and foremost, Aswad Salad isn’t actually a salad as we know it here in the UK. It is in fact a rich, hot and spicy curry featuring blackened aubergine and peanuts mainly, along with tomatoes, garlic and lime. It is one of the most popular dishes on our menu with vegans, veggies and meat-eaters alike.
Photo by PhotographyCourse on Unsplash
Salha, one of our amazing chefs, introduced Aswad Salad to the Houria canon, and she recently shared with us her memories of home and the food she cooked and ate growing up.
Salha was born and grew up in North Sudan, in the Darfur region; one of eight children born into a farming family. She has been in the UK since 2016 and lives in Bristol with her husband and four children.
Salha prepares vegetables
Sudan is situated below Egypt, just over the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, and has been greatly influenced, both in its cuisine and culturally, by colonisers from Arabic countries and the eastern mediterranean since ancient times. Islam and the Arabic language are predominant in many northern parts of the region, while older African languages and cultures predominate in the south. Sudan, and Darfur in particular, has seen some of the worst atrocities of the modern era due to the ongoing battle between these two factions, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths over recent decades and many millions of Sudanese people being displaced.
Map of Darfur in Sudan. Modified from UN map
Salha tells us she has many happy memories of the food cooked and eaten in her family home growing up in Darfur: “The Sudanese have a lot of different dishes, we have different dishes in autumn, different in summer, because we live near the desert. We planted a lot of vegetables in the winter, then the main dishes are available in the autumn, especially aubergines, which are a big part of Sudanese cuisine. We had all the ingredients we needed on our farm, so that was easy for us.
The food we ate mostly every day (as well as aubergine) was fufu, dried meat and lots of okra. We also ate bread, rice, pasta, okra soup, lamb soup and dhal. Meat was very expensive, but there was a lot of camel, lamb and goat”.
North Sudanese cuisine is heavily influenced by East African and Arab ingredients and flavours. Over the whole of Sudan meals are mainly meat or fish stews with a vegetarian side dish and thick porridge made from sorghum or millet. Peanuts feature heavily in North Sudan cuisine and peanut butter is often used to thicken sauces.
Sudanese women spend the better part of the day cooking. Sweet hot tea is consumed at any time of the day, for breakfast, after main meals, and offered to guests at gatherings and socials.
“In Sudan mums teach girls how to cook very early, because they have to work a lot on the farm. The boys learn cleaning and shopping, but the girls learn to cook mainly. Sometimes the girls marry very early, around 16, and when you move in with your husband’s family you need to cook for them. I started cooking when I was 10, by the time I was 13 I was cooking everything. I learnt how to cook Aswad Salad when I was a child, all the ingredients were grown on our farm, my mum cooked it nearly every day.
South Sudan landscape and village Photo by Andrew Scarborough on Unsplash
It’s a very rich dish, like a lot of Sudanese food, to give energy, like sugars, because it is very hot and if you sweat a lot you need rich, sugary food. If you are working hard in the sun on the farm you need a lot of energy!
I like cooking Aswad Salad because it is healthy, my children and husband love it, it is easy and quick to cook, and you can keep it in the fridge.”
Aswad Salad really is a perfect example of all the elements that sum up the Sudanese cuisine. Salha cooks exactly the same dish she made growing up and she cooks for her family now for Houria customers. Next time you order from us, make sure you order an Aswad Salad and get to know the real Darfur and its people.
Aswad Salad served with dahl, rice and flatbread