Daun Ubi Tumbuk (Pounded Cassava Leaves in Coconut Milk)

Variations

• Batak: the Batak of North Sumatra use only a little coconut milk, so the broth stays a clear pale green. That is the photograph.
• Padang (gulai daun singkong): plenty of turmeric and coconut milk, cooked down yellow and thick.
• Dayak: in Kalimantan the Dayak simply boil the leaves with shallots, animal fat and salt. No spices, but the pounding and the long boil are the same.
• Frozen ground leaves: cassava leaves are also sold ground and frozen. That saves the pounding, but they are raw, so the long uncovered boil still applies.

Tips

• Pounding is the detox. Cassava leaves carry the same cyanogenic compounds as the root. The poison is not sitting in the leaf as a gas: the compound and the enzyme that breaks it down are kept apart and only meet when cells break. Chilli and heat describes the same arrangement in mustard, where the two "live in separate cells and the heat is created the moment those cells break and the two meet." In mustard that moment makes the heat; in a cassava leaf it releases the poison. It has to be released before it can be removed, which is why the dish is named for pounding.
• Which is why the pot stays uncovered. The same guide notes that "mustard's allyl isothiocyanate is volatile" and fades in an open bowl. The poison set free by pounding is volatile too, and leaves with the steam. With a lid on it has nowhere to go. Throwing away the first water throws away what is left dissolved in it.
• Same poison, another answer. Fufu peels cassava root thickly: "The bitter and toxic compounds sit just under the skin, so a thin peel leaves them behind." Rawon buries keluak for weeks: "Rawon spends weeks changing the part that was the poison and then eats it." A leaf has no peel to cut away and no reason to wait weeks. Pound it, then boil it.
• Never eaten raw. Not blanched and dressed like a salad either. Pounding and more than twenty minutes of boiling are the conditions of this dish. The more bitter the variety, the longer the boil.
• These are the pounded cassava leaves moambe chicken is served with. The Congolese side dish pounds its leaves for the same reason.
• The coconut milk goes into the second pot. The detox water is water you throw away, and coconut milk in it would go with it. Boil and drain the leaves first, then cook them again with the spices and coconut milk.