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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 celecbrated 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 [[zebu|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, that 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 alond 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.
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 chaning changing the taste of the royal dish.
