Taste Senegal
Sénégal
The westernmost country on the African mainland, where fish, rice, onion and lemon are cooked into some of the continent's best-known dishes.
Senegalese food is eaten around a shared bowl at lunchtime, each person working their own corner of a platter of rice. Thieboudienne, rice cooked in fish and tomato broth, is the national dish. Yassa brings lemon, onion and mustard to chicken or fish; mafé thickens meat with peanut. Dakar's Atlantic coast supplies grouper, sardines and oysters; the interior supplies millet for couscous (thiéré) and porridge. Fermented dried fish and sea snail give the broths a depth hard to reproduce abroad. Bissap (hibiscus), ginger juice and baobab drinks are everywhere, and French bread is breakfast.
3 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 3
- 2 hr 20 min
Thieboudienne
Ceebu jën
Senegal's national dish: fish stuffed with parsley and garlic, braised with tomato and vegetables, then rice cooked in the red broth.
A bit of workMedium heat
- 9 hr 25 min
Poulet yassa
Yassa ginaar
Senegalese chicken marinated in lemon, onion and mustard, grilled, then braised in a heap of slow-cooked onions.
Easy
- 2 hr
Mafé
Maafe
Senegalese peanut stew of beef with tomato, sweet potato, carrot and cabbage in a thick groundnut sauce, over rice.
Easy
Regional cuisines
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3 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the Senegal food quizFood history
The Wolof, Serer and Diola peoples farmed millet and fished the coast long before Europeans arrived. The French colonised Saint-Louis in the seventeenth century and Dakar became the capital of French West Africa; broken rice imported from Indochina replaced millet in the cities and gave thieboudienne its grain. Peanuts, grown as the colonial cash crop, produced mafé. Mustard, baguettes and café au lait stayed after independence in 1960. Senegalese cooks in Paris, New York and Milan have made yassa and thieboudienne the best-travelled West African dishes.
Common ingredients
Techniques
- stuffing fish with rof
- cooking rice in broth
- slow-cooking onions
- marinating in lemon and mustard
- thickening with peanut
- steaming millet couscous