West African cooking with French colonial overlays, organised around rice, fish and groundnuts. Thiéboudienne (the broken-rice-and-fish national dish), mafé (peanut stew) and yassa (mustard-onion chicken or fish) anchor the table; nététou (fermented locust bean) supplies the umami depth. Communal eating around a single platter is the social form; bissap (hibiscus) and ginger drinks finish meals.
Chicken thighs (or lamb) are browned, onions and tomato cooked down with garlic and a single whole chilli, then the meat simmers in stock until tender. A loose peanut paste is stirred in for the final 20 minutes, kept thin enough to ladle. Sweet potato or pumpkin softens in the sauce. A spoon of lime juice at the end balances the richness.
Bone-in beef or lamb is browned, then simmered with onions, garlic, tomato and stock. Smooth peanut butter is whisked in halfway and the stew thickens to a velvety coating. Chunks of cassava, sweet potato and cabbage cook in the sauce towards the end. Serve over plain steamed white rice.
The fish is scored and stuffed with rof, a fragrant paste of parsley, garlic, chilli and stock cube. It poaches in a tomato-and-fish-sauce broth alongside hardy vegetables. The fish and veg come out, broken rice goes in to absorb every drop of flavoured liquid until it turns deep brick-red. The whole thing is plated together in one mound: stained rice underneath, fish and vegetables on top.
Yassa is one of the foundational dishes of Senegalese cooking, born in the Casamance region in the south of the country and carried by the Wolof and Joola diaspora across West Africa and beyond. At its heart it is a study in three things: acidity, alliums and smoke. Chicken is rubbed with a spice mix and marinated for hours in lemon juice, Dijon mustard, garlic and a heap of sliced onions, then charred over fire so the marinade caramelises in patches on the skin. The onions, meanwhile, are cooked low and slow in the leftover marinade with a little stock until they collapse into a glossy, tangy sauce that is both sweet and sharp. It is not a fiercely spicy dish, though a Scotch bonnet usually rides along in the pot for backbone, and the flavour profile is closer to a French-North African pickle than to the chilli-heavy stews further east. Difficulty is moderate: the cooking itself is easy, but yassa rewards patience at two stages, the marinade and the onion reduction. Serve over plain white rice or attieke so the sauce has somewhere to go.