Partly I'm responding to stress - food is something I can plan out and control. It's also a handy distraction from figuring out my next difficult research question. But food is also cheap and universally available - in Dakar, you're never more than 50 m from a Nescafé coffee cart or a lady selling peanuts.
And there are so many variations. I thought I pretty much knew Senegalese food the first time I came. It turns out I was totally wrong. This year, I learned that ceebu jën can have whole fish in the middle of the rice plate and also hand-rolled balls of rice, fish, and spices scattered around the edges. I learned that half the coffee sellers have fresh lime to squeeze into your street espresso. I learned there are at least three types of batter used to make beignet doughnuts (wheat, sorghum, condensed milk with vanilla essence). Just tonight we ate at a small table up the street where Jeanne, a sweet Mankañ woman, chats with her sisters and grills fresh fish on demand. She explained the names of fish I'd never heard, and laid out our morsel on huge plate of salad, dolloping on sharp-tasting, green sauce I'd never tasted. The sauce was her 'secret.' Was it mustard, jalepeños, parsley?
But there is one African food I fantasize about hopelessly, and it's something almost never seen in the States: sorghum. Every culture creates hosts of foods from its staple grains. It's disquieting to realize about how much we make out of wheat. But even though the end results might not be quite as diverse, sorghum is impressive to me. Maybe it's because for the most part it remains outside the processed food chain. You don't buy sorghum shrink-wrapped in supermarkets. Instead, women carry it into your neighborhood in calabashes wrapped in cloth, or sell small bags on rickety tables along the roadside.
Different varieties of sorghum are grown all over Senegal and West Africa; there are slower- and faster-maturing types depending on how long the rainy season lasts in the region. Sorghum and millet were the 'original' staple grains in the Sahelian and Sudanian zones of West Africa. And although imported rice dominates urban food in Senegal, farmers across the country still grow these dryland grains mostly to feed their families, but also to sell to urban markets (eventually reaching the women who carry it in calabashes).
People here tend to associate sorghum with 'traditional' rural culture. When I tell strangers that I ate sorghum porridge for breakfast, they turn to each other, laughing and back-slapping: How 'African' this toubab has become! In today's Wolof slang, "I swear by sorghum and yoghurt!" (War na cere ak sow!) mean's you're really serious about what you're saying. (Maybe it's like swearing to the foods of your ancestors, which demand respect?) Eating sorghum also tends to be associated with the more 'peripheral' ethnic groups - especially the Serer from west Senegal and the Fulbe (Fulani) from the center and north of the country. Maybe because these groups are considered more rural and traditional?
The sorghum family, from right to left: sorghum flour (sunguf, dugup bu soq), cere, caakary, suusël. Behind, a bag of ngalax, sweet ground peanut sauce.
I admit I am extremely ignorant about how raw sorghum grain becomes food. I used to think cere porridge was the whole grain. Now I'm pretty sure it first has to pass through the flour stage. You need to remove the chaff, either by pounding the whole grains in a mortar (and then tossing the mixture in a basket to remove the lighter particles?) or by grinding them in a machine. Next you sprinkle water over the flour and toss it so the droplets form into evenly covered balls (I've seen this done with corn). This is the stage where sorghum divides into different kinds of food - large balls will become one kind of porridge; small ones another. Next you cook the balls by steaming them, then dry them completely so they can be stored.
So, on to the foods:
1) Cere [pronounced "cheré"] is a famous bland porridge made of small balls. Cere comes with and without laalo. Laalo is both the name of a slightly bitter sap mixed with the cere and the tree the sap comes from. Cere with laalo is especially good with meat and tomato sauces. Cere without laao is good with milk, hot or cold. The Serer neighbors who sell small bags of sorghum products in their living room remind us every time we visit that "Cere must be drank with milk, not yoghurt!" Right now, I'm hooked on hot cere in the mornings with fried apples or bananas.
2) Caakary [spelled thiakry in French, and pronounced "chakry"] is made of slightly larger balls, and often perfumed with some sort of essence.
3) Lax [the 'x' is pronounced with a throaty "kh" sound, like a French 'r'].
CORRECTION: I initially reported that caakary took on different names depending on which milk product you eat it with. When eaten with a thin, sweetened and perfumed yoghurt, I said it was called lax. Luckily enough, our neighbor Maggate stopped by this morning to offer some lax brought by a neighbor who just hosted a baptism. I told him: "This doesn't look like caakary!" It wasn't. So I learn that there is yet another kind of sorghum balls - lax sticks together as a soft mush. I still suspect that these same sorghum balls might be called fonde (porridge) when in a sweet watery soup, but Maggate insisted they were just lax.
4) Fonde. In Dakar, people especially like fonde as an evening meal during Ramadan, to break the day-long fast. Sharing a communal bowl, you slurp steaming hot fonde from small dipping ladles.
5) Ngalax. During the Muslim holidays Korite and Tabaski, sorghum (I'm guessing the same kind used in lax) is mixed with incredibly sweet yoghurt, ground peanuts, and vanilla to make the drink ngalax. One cup of this stuff and you're so full you have to skip a meal.
Ngalax made the thick sow we like best.
6) Beignets. More like doughnut holes than the delicate French beignets Amy taught me how to make, these are often made out of wheat. But the darker, denser, heartier version is made from sorghum flour, and I buy this type whenever I have the choice.
7) Pain riche. I could write another post about the variations on French bread here (boulangerie baguettes, dense village-oven loaves, "diabetic" bread with whole wheat flour). When we want to feel a little healthier (we eat a lot of bread here), we buy sandwich-sized baguettes of pain riche at the nearest boutique. The fluffy inside is speckled dark with sorghum flour.
8) Suusël. My newest discovery. Crumbly little cakes made from sorghum flour, ground peanuts, and sugar. Perfect with a rich, milky café au lait on the street.
Addition: I just thought of another famous type of sorghum food: to ["toe"], a national dish in Mali. I have never had the pleasure of tasting it myself, but one Peace Corps volunteer said to alone was responsible for him losing 50 pounds over the course of his assignment. No matter how hungry he became, he could not bring himself to eat more than a handful of this dense, sticky substance.
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