Boulettes: Mauritian Steamed Dumplings
Outside the Kot Ti Baz bistro in Flic en Flac, a stainless steel pot sat steaming on the sidewalk all day long. Dividers split it crosswise into four sections, and each one kept a different kind of dumpling warm in the steam: smooth white ones, long ones flecked with green herbs, translucent ones with the filling showing through the wrapper, and one quarter fried to a golden brown. More pots stood stacked on a burner next to it, and the woman behind the counter was packing dumplings into white boxes.
Boulettes are small dumplings made from fish, meat, shrimp or grated vegetable, usually steamed and sold by the piece - a Sino-Mauritian classic of Mauritian cuisine, sold outside bistros all over the island.
A French Word for a Chinese Dish
The name is French and nothing more: boulette is a diminutive of boule, a ball, so a little ball. French uses it for any ball of meat or dough, however it's cooked, and Mauritius simply borrowed the word for a dish the Chinese community brought with them. The most typical version, though, goes by a Chinese name, niouk yen, and is made from grated chayote, which on the island is called chou chou. Boulettes are eaten all over Mauritius and every community buys them, not just the descendants of immigrants from Guangdong. The closest cousin lives on neighboring Réunion: the local bouchons share the Chinese origin and the same steamer, only with a dough of wheat flour and cassava and a pork filling.
The Hakka, Two Chinatowns and Chayote
Chinese immigrants came to the island in two waves. The first were Cantonese in the eighteenth century; the second was set off by the Taiping Rebellion: in July 1860 the ship Ville de Paris landed seven Hakka from Singapore, and by the end of the century they made up the majority of the Chinese community. That's why Port Louis long had two Chinatowns, the upper Cantonese one and the lower Hakka one, which were hardly on friendly terms - and today both sell the same dumplings. Nobody has ever pinned down which of them first grated chayote into fish paste. All that's certain is that nobody in China would recognize niouk yen: chayote isn't a common ingredient there, so the most Chinese dish on the island is also a dish China has never heard of. A pot on the street can turn into a company - a vendor known as Ah-Kong started out with a stall in La Louise in 1997, and eleven years later it had become a limited company.
What's Inside and How to Order Boulettes
There's barely any dough here in the European sense. The chayote version is built on grated vegetable held together with tapioca starch, with dried shrimp and sometimes a little ground meat for flavor; the meat version is beef with ginger and dark soy sauce, bound with nothing but starch. Everything is shaped by hand and steamed for about twenty minutes, until the balls firm up; no frying pan is ever involved. It's the same trick as in the Sunday broth back home in Czechia: the little liver dumplings aren't held together by flour either, but by what's inside them, and they get counted out by the piece too. One vendor will have ten kinds or more, and nobody expects you to pick just one.
You order by the piece: two, five, ten. Then comes the question of how. There are three ways to eat boulettes - a few pieces as an add-on to boiled mine bouillie noodles, a bigger pile swimming in clear chicken broth from the pot standing right next to it, or dry with sauces: hot chili paste, garlic, soy and a handful of chopped scallions. The broth is a sit-down meal; the dry box is a meal you eat with your hands as you walk on down the street. One tip for your first order: ask for one of each kind and you get a whole tasting flight for the same money, and after ten pieces you know which one you'll order on its own next time.
A Box with Sauces Outside Kot Ti Baz
I bought my boulettes from that very pot outside the Kot Ti Baz bistro in the center of Flic en Flac (see Where to Eat in Flic en Flac), late in the evening. I took a big portion dry, with all the sauces, chili paste and scallions - of the three ways, that's the one I liked best. The chayote ones were soft and faintly sweet, with a shrimp note underneath that I first mistook for fish; the meat ones had a springy bite, and the ginger in them only came through after the chili, which had taken over by then. The big portion with sauces cost 250 MUR (5 EUR). You won't find the bistro on any map. The pot outside is easier to find: just follow the steam.
