Egg and Bacon Rougaille
Serves 2
Mauritius is a nation with the spice routes woven into its fabric. The island was uninhabited before the arrival of European settlers during the spice race, when the Dutch, French, then British each took advantage of its strategic Indian Ocean position. A turning point in history came when an 18th-century French spice trader, impeccably named Pierre Poivre, smuggled nutmeg plants from Indonesian Maluku and planted them in Mauritius and Réunion, so breaking the Dutch trading monopoly and making spices more accessible to the world than ever before. (Poivre is possibly also the one immortalised in the tongue twister ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper’.)
The well-worn phrase “melting pot” does capture Mauritian culture. A fractured past founded on trade has left a population of Indians, Africans, Chinese and Europeans, and given rise to one of the world’s great Creole cuisines.
A cornerstone of the home cooking is a gingery tomato sauce called rougaille. It can enliven seafood, salted fish, sausages or, as here, be used as a base for softly poached eggs. There is an unusual clash of Western and Eastern accents — thyme meets coriander — that is typical of playful Mauritian cooking. The result is electric.
100g (¾ cup) bacon lardons
1 onion, finely chopped
3cm ginger, peeled and minced (1 tablespoon)
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 bird’s-eye chilli, seeds in, finely chopped
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
Small bunch thyme,
leaves stripped
400g ripe tomatoes, chopped, or good tinned tomatoes
2–4 eggs
Handful coriander leaves
Flatbreads and hot sauce, to serve (optional)
Put the lardons in a frying pan and set over a medium heat. Cook until the fat renders, then the bacon crisps. Add the onion and fry until well softened. Add the ginger, garlic, chilli, cumin and thyme leaves and cook for a few minutes longer.
Add the tomatoes and cook at a slow boil for about 20 minutes, squishing the tomatoes with the back of a spoon occasionally to break them down. The red should deepen a shade. Taste and balance the flavours with salt and a little sugar, if needed.
Make dents in the sauce with the spoon and crack an egg into each one. Sprinkle each egg with a little salt and cover the pan with a lid (or a plate). Leave the eggs to steam for 4–5 minutes, until the whites are set and the yolks are still runny. Scatter with coriander and serve with flatbreads and hot sauce, if you like.
Images and text from The Nutmeg Trail by Eleanor Ford, photography by Ola O. Smit.
Murdoch Books, $49.99. Cover illustrations: nutmeg and chilli from rawpixel; cinnamon and star anise from Shutterstock; peppercorns from Creative Market.
Love this recipe? Check out our others here
