Ladob

Ladob is a Seychellois dish in which bananas, sweet potatoes, breadfruit and similar ingredients are simmered in coconut milk. When it is made sweet, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg and other ingredients are added, and it is cooked until the fruit or tubers are soft and the cooking liquid becomes creamy. Rather than being set in a mold like a pudding, it is a sweet in which the pieces keep their shape and are eaten together with the thickened liquid.

The same name, ladob, is also used for a savory dish. That version uses salted fish and salt in place of sugar. Although ladob is often introduced as the name of a sweet, the word does not refer only to a dessert.

Schematic diagram of the ingredient composition, based on the description by the Seychelles Cultural Foundation. It distinguishes sweet ladob from savory ladob. Source. Figure: Sweetlore.

Breadfruit and bananas, cooked down in a thick liquid

A market selling bananas and other fruits and vegetables in Victoria, Seychelles. Photographed on October 22, 2011.

Photo: Fabio Achilli / CC BY 2.0 / Original. Reduced display image from the distributing source; no further modifications.

The main ingredient of sweet ladob is not fixed to a single one. Some versions use ripe cooking bananas, some use sweet potatoes, and some use the fruit of the breadfruit tree; all of them are simmered in coconut milk. Despite having “bread” in its name, breadfruit is not a wheat product but a tree that bears starchy fruit. In Seychelles it is eaten in many ways, including baked, boiled and fried, and ladob is one of them.

In ladob, the firmness and ripeness of the fruit or tubers affect the result. Even when fully cooked, the fruit or tubers keep their shape, coated in the coconut cooking liquid around them. If the size of the cubes or rounds, the ingredient used or its ripeness differs, the time it takes to soften also varies.

Coconut milk is not merely a sauce poured over at the end but the liquid in which the ingredients are cooked. As the fruit or tubers simmer, the coconut milk itself thickens. During simmering, the coconut flavor penetrates the ingredients, and a thick cooking liquid remains around them.

Where vanilla and nutmeg come in

Vanilla and nutmeg add aroma to sweet ladob. Some versions also include cinnamon, so the spices cannot be limited to one fixed combination. Thanks to the coconut cooking liquid, which contains fat and is sweetened with sugar, the sweet has a rich mouthfeel even without dairy cream.

Ladob is eaten either warm or after it has cooled, with the fruit or tubers and the thick coconut liquid served together.

A version made by simmering grated cassava

The Creole Melting Pot, which documents Seychellois home cooking, records a recipe (the proportions of ingredients and the method of preparation) called ladob koudpwen mayok, in which cassava is grated, formed into small balls and simmered in sweet coconut milk. This is an example of ladob that involves more than simply cutting up fruit and simmering it.

In this method, the ingredients are held together by the moisture of the grated cassava, without kneading them firmly. Leaves or paper are laid on the bottom of the pot, and everything is simmered over gentle heat. The cook explains that high heat is avoided because the starch scorches easily, and that the pot is shaken instead of stirred so the balls do not break apart. The cassava balls, having absorbed the cooking liquid, are served together with the coconut milk remaining around them.

Some people use this name for small cassava biscuits. Along with differences in processing, such as grating, shaping, simmering and baking, the names have been handed down in each household.

Ladob, a name tied to a way of cooking

Ladob is also written la daube in French and is linked to the name of a stew. It is a dish rooted in the Creole food culture of Seychelles, where the lives of people who came from France, Africa and the islands of the Indian Ocean overlapped.

Settlers who came from Mauritius in 1770 brought cassava for eating and for cultivation. Cassava and sweet potatoes also became staple foods of the enslaved people forced to work on the islands. Breadfruit is said to have been brought over from Mauritius later, in the first half of the 19th century. The starchy crops that go into the ladob pot carry the history of the people who came to the islands and of cultivation.

Ladob appears not only as a household dish but also at formal tables. At the banke, a traditional Creole feast of former times, a sweet was served after soup, roasts, and curries or stews. At the Christmas banke recreated in 2019 by a cultural heritage organization and a restaurant, ladob was also served at the end, together with sweet stewed papaya and Creole cakes.

Glossary