#chibwabwa

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the zambian food series, part five: chibwabwa

chibwabwa is the cichewa and cinsenga name for pumpkin leaves — the young, tender leaves of the pumpkin plant, harvested while still soft enough to cook quickly, before they develop the tough fibres that make older leaves unpleasant to eat. from the same pumpkin plant that produces the yellow-orange fruit — but in zambia, the leaves are as valued as the fruit.

the preparation: the young leaves are stripped of their stems and any tough central ribs — the stripping done by hand, folding the leaf back on itself and pulling the stem away in a single motion that every zambian who has helped prepare a family meal has performed hundreds of times. the stripped leaves are washed, sometimes blanched briefly, then cooked — most typically in a groundnut-based sauce.

the groundnut sauce is the heart of chibwabwa. raw groundnuts — peanuts — ground to a paste or powder, dissolved in water to make a thin, creamy base. the pumpkin leaves go into this groundnut base, with onion, salt, and sometimes tomato. the whole dish cooks until the leaves are tender and the groundnut has thickened the sauce to a consistency that coats the leaves and pools at the bottom of the pot.

dark green leaves in a rich, pale, slightly nutty sauce. eaten as a relish alongside nshima — scooped up with the right hand in the rolling, dipping motion that the nshima post described.

what makes chibwabwa culturally significant beyond its nutritional value: its accessibility. the pumpkin plant grows in almost every zambian garden, in every agro-ecological zone, in every season. the groundnut is available in every market in the country. chibwabwa requires no exotic ingredient, no specialist knowledge, no equipment beyond a pot and a fire. it is the food that the smallholder farming household whose garden produces pumpkin can always make, in the hungry season and the harvest season alike, from what the garden provides.

the food that appears on the table when someone who has been in the city too long comes home to the village — cooked by an aunt or a grandmother with the specific combination of groundnut and pumpkin leaf that that household has been cooking since before the visitor was born. in the proportions and timing that no written recipe captures because the knowledge lives in the hands.

the taste of home is not abstract in zambia. it has a specific flavour. it is green and nutty and slightly earthy and deeply familiar.

it is chibwabwa.

the zambian food series continues. 🍲

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the zambian food series: how zambia tastes itself

there is no more fundamental expression of zambian identity than the act of making nshima, sitting down to eat it, rolling it in your right hand into a soft ball, dipping it into the relish, and eating it with the people you love. this is not food. this is not merely nutrition. this is the daily ceremony that has marked zambian family life across every tribe, every province, every generation for as long as the maize and the cassava and the millet that make it have grown in this soil.

the zambian food series begins with nshima because nshima is the foundation. but it will not stay at nshima. it will go to the relish — the extraordinary diversity of what zambian cooks put alongside the nshima, the proteins and the vegetables and the sauces that vary by province and by season and by cultural tradition in ways that the rest of the world has never fully understood because the rest of the world has not been looking.

ifisashi — the peanut and vegetable relish of northern province, made from groundnut powder, dried vegetables, and a patience in cooking that the recipe requires and that the result rewards.

chibwabwa — pumpkin leaves cooked with groundnut powder in a way that turns a garden vegetable into something deeply satisfying, the kind of dish that every zambian who has been abroad too long dreams about on a cold night in a foreign city.

chikanda — the extraordinary preparation made from the ground tubers of a wild orchid that grows in the miombo woodland of northern province, mixed with peanut powder and a process of cooking and pressing that produces a firm, protein-rich cake. called african polony for its appearance. tasting of nothing the name suggests.

kapenta — the tiny, dried, intensely flavoured fish from lake kariba and lake tanganyika that appears in every market and most kitchens across the country, the umami foundation of countless zambian relishes.

the zambian food series will explore all of this — not as a cookbook, but as a cultural document. food in zambia is not separate from the history and the kingdoms and the rivers and the land that the other series have been describing. the chikanda that comes from the miombo woodland orchids of northern province carries the bemba people's specific relationship to their forest. the kapenta from lake tanganyika arrived in southern province along the same trade routes the kingdoms series described. the sweet potato of chibale chiefdom that feeds lusaka is a food story and a cultural story and a land story simultaneously.

food is how zambia tastes itself.

the zambian food series begins. 🍲

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Chibwabwa Infographic Poster

Chibwabwa is a well known vegetable in Zambia commonly known as Pumpkin Leaf. It can be cooked in many different ways and is usually eaten with Nshima and your choice of protein.

Are you familiar with Chibwabwa? What is it called in your language?

I can’t wait to introduce you to more Zambian foods through illustration. And possibly offer these designs for prints.