Varanga

Royal dish - varanga

Text from Passprt for Madagascar - 56th edition, January/February 2010

Malagasy dishes are all cooked and well cooked and the one which beats the record for cooking time is undoubtedly varanga, a meat dish, specially prepared for major royal festivities.

It must be remembered that at the time for royalty, we celebrated the Fandroana or royal bath which was a sacred moment, intended to strengthen ties between the people and the Creator, between the ruler and his people and between men themselves. And this annual celebration was marked by a great slaughter of zebus including the sharing out of the meat to seal the relationship. On this occasion, each of the population groups would present the sovereign with the most succulent cut of the animal, which is the vodi-hena or the rump that only he had the right to eat. The result at the end of the day was a mountain of meat that the sovereign alone could not finish. The elders then discovered a method to keep it until the following year by making a conserve in the fat: this was a varanga.

At that time, only the Zanakandriamitondra clan was authorised to carry out this particular task because the delicate preparation of varanga is long, requiring great patience. To begin, the meat must be cut into chunks, removing all the bone, which when completed is placed without water in large iron pots on a fire to allow the fat the time to melt slowly and this will take time, lots of time when we realise that a week is necessary to achieve the desired result. So for a week, day and night without interruption, the fire is continually maintained by the members of the clan, requiring above all complex organisation transmitted from generation to generation over centuries: take turns to fetch wood, to stoke the fire while carefully ensuring it was not too hot and speeding up the process. This explains why an entire clan was mobilised to bring this special and delicate work to term as the least failure of the fire could spoil the meat and everyone was very careful about his work.

After one week, all the fat rose to the surface and the meat remained at the bottom of the pot. This was close to the final stage. Now was the moment to pour the fat into another pot, this time in clay, then to plunge all the pieces of meat from the first pot, the addition of salt, lots of salt, then yet another cooking of several more hours when the varanga or pickled meat was complete. It is not known if there was any special significance in the fact that the end of this operation was carried out in the morning before 9 o'clock.

The varanga will be prepared and consumed the following year to the next celebration of the Fandroana Day by the sovereign, his family and relatives.

Currently, some cordon bleus have revived this traditional varanga but they had to work out a way of accelerating the process, which as we said above, took time, much time without changing the taste of the royal dish.