Before I moved to Africa, I was, like many Americans, vehemently opposed to eating anything that too closely resembled its living form. This included anything with legs or anything that was essentially watching me eat it.
I still get a little skeeved out by such foods, but I’m quickly adapting to how most people around the world eat. Case in point is this ceebu jen dish, served at the lunch I mentioned yesterday. Though I averted my eyes from the fish’s head, the bone-in meat was really good and the seasoned rice even better. The dish was more flavorful than spicy and was made with far too much (but very delicious) cooking oil.
Ceebu jen and yassa poulet are probably the most oft-eaten Senegalese dishes. They can be found on menus at a wide range of places, from upscale restaurants to cloth-doored food shacks. Decent restaurants serve everything with utensils, but the traditional way of eating these and other Senegalese meals is to use only the hands.
We ate our lunch in that traditional setting, sitting on mats on the ground around big dishes of yassa and ceebu. Spoons were available if wanted them, but most people opted for the real deal, no utensils allowed. In Islamic culture, only the right hand is used when eating, as the left hand is reserved for, uh, assisting with bathroom matters. It was challenging to scoop the food with only one hand, and I was a rice-covered monster by the end of the meal (unlike the Senegalese man eating with us, who was clean as could be).
One eats the rice by taking a palmful then squeezing and rolling the rice between the fingers and palm until a ball is formed. It took me more than a few tries to even begin to get the hang of it. It’s customary to only scoop food from the part of the dish directly in front of you and not impede on your tablemates’ eating turf. At our lunch, everyone just grabbed chunks from the vegetables as we went along. (Dakar is, overall, probably the worst place in the world for a germophobe, ha.)
Want to make ceebu jen at home? Here’s a great recipe from my expat pal Khady, using ingredients you can find anywhere.
Rachael Cullins is a twentysomething American girl living in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and two dogs. She blogs about her adventures in Senegal and travels elsewhere in West Africa. She will reside in Dakar until summer 2013, when she and her family will move to another foreign post as part of her husband’s career with the U.S. government. In addition to West Africa, she has traveled to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and Costa Rica and plans to continually add to that list.
