Along with the kapokia leaves, she used onion, dried fish, bouillon cubes, salt and chotu to create the sauce. Chotu is a Kabye word for a fermented seasoning. When people translate the word into French, they call it moutarde traditionnelle, or in English, traditional mustard. While it doesn’t taste exactly like mustard, it has a strong, stinky and sharp taste like mustard does.
I enjoyed the dish! It was especially nice to try something I had watched being made. I paid more attention to the range of flavors I could taste. The texture of the sauce was a little glutinous or slimey. Before living in Togo, I would have turned away from that texture before trying the dish. But I’ve gotten used to this texture because a lot of sauces here have this texture, and it’s something Togolese seem to really enjoy. Although this was not my favorite sauce, I enjoyed watching Maman cook. It’s so cool that the base of the sauce comes from tree leaves! In the U.S. we eat spinach and other leafy garden vegetables, but I rarely hear of anyone cooking with tree leaves.
I had the chance to watch my host mom prepare this whole dish. After she had gathered the kapokia leaves, she sorted them and removed the thickest stems. She put the leaves in a pot full of water. She brought the water to a boil over the fire. She boiled them for a couple of minutes and then took the pot off the fire.
While this pot cooled a little, she prepared the rest of the sauce in another pot. With a little bit of water she began cooking dried fish.
