An Amerindian-rooted Guyanese coconut milk ground provision stew — cassava, plantain, eddoe, and other root vegetables slow-simmered in rich coconut milk with dumplings and fish or pork until the broth becomes silky and tropical.
Metemgee is the oldest cooking in Guyana's culinary history — a dish whose roots go back to the Arawak and other Amerindian peoples who first inhabited these lands, who cooked their cassava and plantain and ground provisions in coconut milk long before anyone else arrived. Everything that came after — the African, Indian, Chinese, and European additions — built on top of this foundation, but the foundation itself remains. The name means something like "everything cooked together," and the dish delivers on that promise: a generous assortment of root vegetables and ground provisions — cassava, plantain, eddoe, sweet potato, cocoa — cooked together in coconut milk until they are soft and the broth has become thick and tropical and sweet from the vegetables themselves. The dumplings are added near the end and absorb the broth. The fish or salted pork is the protein thread that runs through it. Metemgee is Sunday food, country food, the food of Guyana's rural interior where ground provisions are grown and coconuts are plentiful. Eating it is an act of connection to something older than written records, a continuity with the peoples who first mapped this territory with their cooking.
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