Romazava (Clear Beef and Greens Broth with Mafana)

Variations

• The meat: beef alone or pork alone are both common. In Madagascar it is zebu, whose lean muscle is firm enough to want closer to two hours.
• Fish romazava: on the coast, white fish replaces the meat and the simmer drops to twenty minutes. The order of the greens does not change.
• The greens: the canonical three are anamafana (mafana), anatsonga (a mustard green) and anamamy (a nightshade leaf). Mustard greens and watercress stand in for two of them. Mafana is the one with no good substitute.
• Against abgoosht: that dish separates broth from solids and then mashes the solids. Romazava stays one bowl, and keeping the pieces intact is the point.
• If you want it hot: sakay goes into each person's bowl. Keeping it out of the pot is the whole arrangement.

Tips

• What mafana gives is not heat. Chilli and heat ends by splitting capsaicin from mustard's allyl isothiocyanate: capsaicin is already present, dissolves in fat and survives boiling, while mustard's pungency does not exist until cells break, needs water, and is driven off by heat. Spilanthol is neither. It is an alkylamide, so instead of a burn it produces tingling, a mild local numbness, and a flood of saliva. The plant is called the toothache plant for exactly that reason.
• Sichuan pepper belongs to the same family. The hydroxy-alpha-sanshool behind the buzz in mapo tofu and malatang is an alkylamide too. But that one arrives as a dried spice woken in oil, with the tingle out in front of the dish; mafana arrives as a leaf, cooks for two minutes at the end, and leaves the broth clear.
• "Clear broth" is the name. Ro is broth, mazava is clear. Everything stocks and broths asks for — start in cold water, skim, never let it boil — is here a matter of keeping the name honest rather than a preference. Pot-au-feu sets the same conditions for the same reason.
• The greens go in on two clocks. Straight out of fresh herbs — hardy first, delicate last: five minutes for the mustard greens, two for the mafana and watercress. That is a different aim from how sigeumchi-namul and horta handle boiled leaves, since here the leaves stay in the liquid rather than being lifted out of it.
• When you cannot get mafana. Growing paracress (Acmella oleracea) from seed in a pot and picking the leaves is the practical route. To gesture at it, grind a teaspoon of Sichuan pepper in at the end — you get a comparable tingle and none of the salivation or the grassy note. Better to serve it without and call it something else.
• Do not crush the tomatoes. It is the commonest way the broth goes cloudy. Left whole, twenty minutes gets all the flavour out of them anyway.