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''Text from "Passport for Madagascar" - September, October 2013 - 78th edition''
== Cooking in Madagascar ==
Each nation has its own culinary culture distinguishing it from others. The Malagasy have also their own, based on rice.
Their dishes are simple and healthy as they usually consist of meat boiled in broth or brèdes (edible leaves), or grilled to accompany the dish of rice. However, these traditional preparations also follow the modern trend with the widespread use of cooking oil which has replaces tallow for over a century and we are constantly finding new ways to adapt them.
More and more ways are being found to enhance and give new flavour to some tubuers such as ''voamanga'' (sweet potato), ''saonjo'' (edible arum root) and ''oviala'' (kind of wild yams or fruit such as breadfruit). The tubers are cooked very simple in water and the easy peeling off of their skins while eating them is the greatest of all pleasures.
Bread made its appearance very much later with the arrival of Europeans. People here have worked some of the flour as ''tavolo'', rice, corn, to make cakes or ''koba'' and their dough mixed with mashed banana and sugar is cooked in water for minutes and wrapped in broad leaves, such as banana, ravinala or longoza.
However, there is another variety of ''[[koba]]'' requriring a more sophisticated technique and more hours of cooking. The basis of this preparation is always rice flour mixed with sugar and crushed peanuts, then everything is spread on banana leaves, placed next to each other, then wrapped and tied with the fibres from these leaves, producing a volumne of 50, 60, 70 to 80 centimetres long which will be placed in a pot of the same length or in halves of metal drums. As an economy measure several can be prepared at the same time as over two or three days. When all water has evaporated, the ''koban-dravina'' is ready for eating: this sweet, dark brown cake is then cut into slices, with its envelope of leaves, and, gradually as it is eaten, reveals with each slice how the mixture is composed. Because of its long preparation, it is understandable why the slices are cut so thinly by the traders in the market place.
''Text from "Passport for Madagascar" - 56th edition, January/February 2010''
