Eat the Match: Portugal vs DR Congo

Bacalhau and moambe chicken — the salted fish that built an empire and the palm-oil stew that outlasted one.

Group Stage · Houston · June 17, 2026 · Gusto

Portugal arrived in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1482. They were the first Europeans to make contact with the Kingdom of Kongo. The encounter changed both places in ways that took centuries to fully account for — the slave trade, colonialism, independence in 1960, and a relationship between the two nations that is still being renegotiated now.

I am not a historian. I am a cook. What I can tell you is what that encounter left in the kitchen.

It left the salt cod in Portugal — bacalhau, the fish that Portuguese fishermen pulled from the cold waters of Newfoundland and the North Sea, salted and dried until it could survive the long voyages to West Africa and come back. A fish that is no longer fresh and not quite preserved but something in between — transformed by salt and time into something denser, more complex, and completely its own.

It left red palm oil in both places. The Kingdom of Kongo had been using Elaeis guineensis — African oil palm — long before any Portuguese ship arrived. The Portuguese recognized what they had found and brought it into trade. Today, unrefined red palm oil appears in Portuguese Afro-Atlantic cooking and throughout sub-Saharan Africa as a foundational cooking fat.

Tonight Portugal plays the DR Congo. The kitchen has been having this conversation for five hundred years. I am finishing two dishes that are part of the same long story.

The Portuguese side — bacalhau à brás.

There are said to be 365 ways to prepare bacalhau in Portugal — one for every day of the year. I have made perhaps forty of them. Bacalhau à brás is the one I return to most often, because it does something specific: it uses three ingredients most kitchens have (eggs, potatoes, onion) to turn a piece of dried salt cod into something that should not be as good as it is, and reliably is.

The technique is simple. Salt cod is soaked until the salt is drawn out, then flaked. Shoestring potatoes are fried until crisp. Onion and garlic are softened in good olive oil. The potatoes and cod go in, then beaten egg, scrambled loosely — not cooked until dry, not left wet, but held in the moment between the two. Black olives and parsley go in at the end.

The correct execution leaves the eggs soft — just barely set, glossy, clinging to the potatoes and the cod rather than forming a solid mass. If your eggs are cooked hard, you have made a fish frittata. That is not bacalhau à brás. Pull the pan from the heat 30 seconds before you think it is ready. The residual heat in the pan will finish the eggs correctly while you plate.

Note on soaking: bacalhau must be soaked in cold water for 24 to 48 hours, changing the water every 8 hours, before cooking. This process removes the salt that preserved it — without it, the fish is inedibly salty. The soaking also partially rehydrates it, changing its texture from firm and dry to yielding but still with a pleasant chew. Plan ahead.

Ingredients

Method

  1. Drain the soaked bacalhau. Place in a pot, cover with fresh cold water, bring to a gentle simmer. Poach for 8 minutes until the fish just flakes. Do not boil it aggressively — this toughens the texture. Remove, cool slightly, then remove all skin and bones (there will be bones — be thorough). Flake into large pieces.
  2. Fry the potato matchsticks in the oil at 180°C until golden and crisp. Drain on a rack, season with salt. Alternatively: use quality thin shoestring potato crisps, lightly crushed. This is the shortcut I allow because the potatoes in this dish lose their crispness quickly anyway — the crisps hold better and the dish is still correct.
  3. In a large, wide pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook slowly, for 12 to 15 minutes, until completely soft and beginning to turn gold. They should be almost melting. This is the foundation. Do not rush it.
  4. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute. Add the flaked bacalhau and the fried potatoes. Toss gently to combine — you want the cod to remain in identifiable pieces, not mashed.
  5. Reduce the heat to low. Pour the beaten eggs over everything. Stir gently with a wooden spoon in slow, large movements — you are scrambling the egg around the cod and potatoes, not folding them into the egg. As soon as the egg is barely set — glossy, just cohesive, not wet but not dry — pull the pan from the heat.
  6. Add the olives and parsley. Fold in gently. Taste for salt (it may need none — the bacalhau retains some salt even after soaking). Season with white pepper.
  7. Serve immediately, directly from the pan to the plate. Bacalhau à brás does not wait.

Carried-over cooking and why the residual heat is part of the recipe

Eggs in a scramble are finished by two heat sources: the pan itself and the residual heat held by the other ingredients in the pan (the potato, the fish, the onion). A pan pulled from the heat at 70°C of egg temperature will continue cooking the eggs until the residual heat disperses — typically reaching 75–78°C, which is the correct set temperature for glossy, cohesive scrambled eggs. If you wait until the eggs look set in the pan, they are already overcooked by the time they reach the plate, because the residual heat hasn't dispersed yet. The visual cue for pulling: the eggs should look 80% set — glossy, barely cohesive, with the faintest look of moisture at the surface. In the 30 seconds it takes to plate and walk to the table, they finish.

The Congolese side — moambe chicken.

Moambe is the national dish of the Democratic Republic of Congo and appears in various forms across Central and West Africa. It is a chicken stew braised in red palm oil and palm nut cream — moambe sauce — with spices and aromatics. The palm nut cream comes from boiling and pressing the fruit of the African oil palm, producing a thick, orange-red liquid that smells of nothing you have encountered from any other cooking fat and tastes of the tropics in a way that cannot be approximated.

Red palm oil — unrefined, from the same palm fruit — is essential. It is available at African and Caribbean grocery stores and online. It looks like solidified orange-red fat, smells of something between pumpkin and tropical fruit, and behaves differently from vegetable oil in the pan. Do not substitute with refined palm oil (bleached, deodorized, the version used in processed food) — that product has had everything useful removed from it.

The dish is not complicated. What it requires is the correct fat and the patience to let the chicken braise until the meat falls from the bone into a sauce that has taken on the richness of the palm nut cream. That is the whole technique.

Ingredients

Method

  1. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper. In a large, heavy pot, heat the red palm oil over medium-high heat. When it is shimmering — it heats faster than vegetable oil — add the chicken pieces skin-side down. Brown in batches without crowding, 4 minutes per side. Remove and set aside.
  2. Reduce heat to medium. In the same pot, add the onion and cook for 7 minutes until soft. Add the garlic and ginger and cook 1 minute more. Add the tomatoes and cook for 5 minutes, breaking them down.
  3. Add the moambe sauce and 200ml water. Stir to combine. The sauce will turn a deep, rich orange. Return the chicken pieces. Add the whole Scotch bonnet — it flavors the broth without breaking the heat. Season well.
  4. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook over low heat for 45 to 50 minutes until the chicken is fully tender and the sauce has thickened and darkened. Remove the Scotch bonnet before serving unless heat is wanted — in which case break it open into the pot and stir.
  5. Scatter parsley or coriander over the top. Serve with white rice or fufu.
Portugal arrived in Congo in 1482. They have been cooking with what they found in each other's kitchens ever since.

The salted fish and the palm oil — two ingredients that crossed the same ocean in opposite directions.

Bacalhau is a Portuguese food. It is made from Atlantic cod caught in cold northern waters, salted and dried, then carried south on ships that traded along the West African coast. Red palm oil is a Congolese food — or rather, it belongs to the African oil palm belt that runs across sub-Saharan Africa. The Portuguese found it in the Kingdom of Kongo and understood immediately what they had: a stable, versatile cooking fat that could survive long voyages. Both ingredients traveled on Portuguese ships. The bacalhau went south. The palm oil went north, into the Portuguese Afro-Atlantic diaspora kitchen, where it appears today in dishes in Lisbon's African neighborhoods, in Brazil, in Cape Verde. When you put both dishes on a table, you are putting two ingredients back in the same room that a set of ships separated five hundred years ago. The kitchen does not forget.