Gâteaux Piments Salad: Mauritian Fried Split Pea Balls, Second Time on the Table
I found out just how much Mauritius loves football during the World Cup in Qatar, which I watched from the island. Football goes with beer, and in Mauritius beer doesn't come with potato chips - it comes with gajak, small snacks to go with a drink, usually fried. The classic gajak is gâteau piment, a ball of yellow split peas with chili and cilantro, sold by the piece on every corner. Any balls left over go hard by morning. That's where this dish begins.
Gâteaux piments salad (in French: salade de gâteaux piments) is a cold salad of Mauritian cuisine made from crumbled fried split pea balls, onion, tomatoes and fresh cilantro, dressed with lemon and oil. A fried snack that comes back the next day dressed as a vegetable.
A Salad Named After a Cake That Isn't a Cake
The name is a plain French description: a salad of gâteaux piments, literally of "chili cakes". A Parisian expects a patisserie and gets a deep fryer. In Mauritius a gâteau is any piece of dough or tuber that has been through hot oil - gâteau arouille from taro, gâteau patate from sweet potatoes, gâteau piment from split peas; Creole spells it gato pima, and the salad itself never earned a Creole name of its own - people call it by the French one. The dal in the ball is the same yellow split peas the island bakes into dholl puri flatbreads; here the same peas skip the rolling pin and go straight into hot oil.
The salad is a Mauritian invention; the ball underneath it is shared. Neighboring Réunion fries crushed peas into bonbon piment - the same idea and another sweet word for a savory snack - except that there the balls at most get crumbled over a salad as a crunchy topping, and nobody has turned them into a recipe with a name.
What Turns a Hard Ball into a Salad
The star of the show is a ball that's no longer fresh. A fresh gâteau piment is crisp and it would be a shame to crumble it; yesterday's one has gone hard, and that's exactly why it works - it soaks up lemon and tomato juice, softens on the outside while its pea center keeps the cumin and cilantro. It does the same job a crouton does in soup, only you give it lemon and tomato instead of broth. Into the bowl go red onion, tomatoes, plenty of fresh cilantro, stems and all, salt and pepper; some recipes marinate the onion in white wine first and throw in fresh chili.
Nobody buys this salad on the street. It gets made at home the day after someone bought more gâteaux piments than they could eat. It's served cold as a starter, and if even the salad gets left over, the ball has a third life: the mixture goes into a split baguette and turns into a sandwich. One bag of balls will see you through three days straight on the island. If you want to make the salad yourself, buy a few more at the stall than you'll eat - the ones that go into it are the ones that have gone hard overnight.
A Plate for the World Cup
I tasted the salad in Mauritius at my hotel's restaurant, in the weeks when the World Cup was on and every match came with a cold beer. The crumbled balls had soaked up the lemon and softened, but the cumin and chili were still there, so every bite started with tomato and ended with a mild burn; the cilantro gave it a freshness the fried ball on its own never had. Fresh gâteaux piments struck me as dry, as I write in my article on them. The second half suited them better than the first.
