How to make Ceebu Jenn: So a few weeks ago Duma and Fatsow (Fatou Sow, Duma's Senegalese sis) organized a little cooking lesson and lunch at our apartment. Duma was determined to impress friends and family by preparing the popular Senegalese dish, Ceebu Jenn (Wolof for rice and fish; pronounced chee-bou-jenn). This dish is notorious for taking hours to stew and is world renowned for being absolutely delicious. So we invited friends, family, and neighbors to join us for our first home-cooked ceebu jenn at 2pm. Duma, Fatsow and Jini, who was visiting at the time, got up early to go to a local market to buy all of the ingredients, which came to a total of 12,000cfa (about $24 - which we used to feed about 20 people). They returned at noon with bags of spices, vegetables, fish and rice. Five hours later (yes, at 5pm) we served our very hungry guests some excellent ceebu jenn, which we had painstakingly made with Fatsow's help and guidance. We are still determined to make this dish by ourselves and in less than five hours.

Here are some pictures I took of the process, a basic version of which is outlined below:

Step 1: Clean all the ingredients (vegetables and fish) and start cutting. Gut the fish and cut them in half. Cut vegetables in halves and quarts (relatively large pieces for communal bowl presentation).



Step 2: Boil the veggies starting with starchier, harder to boil types (potatoes, cassava, turnips, carrots, cabbage) and ending with eggplant and piment (chili pepper). After boiling veggies for about 30 minutes, strain them and place them aside in a covered bowl.


Step 3: Meanwhile, use a mortar and pestle to pound some parsley, black pepper, dried piment, and garlic into a juicy paste. Then cut slits into the mid-sections of the fish and stuff this green paste in there. This spicy goodness is called farci (stuffing).

Step 4: Use the mortar and pestle again to pound onion, green pepper, garlic and spices (piment, salt, pepper, maggi and jumbo - MSG-rich bullion cubes) into a juicy sauce. This will be added to the stew pot later on.



Step 5: Cook the stuffed fish in half a liter of vegetable oil in a deep stew pot. Once the fish is cooked remove it and set it aside. Add water and a large can of tomato paste to the pot and bring to a simmer. Stir in sauce from mortar (Step 4) with additional spices to taste (more salt, piment, jumbo/maggi and ground dried peppers).


Step 6: Overall the stew should simmer for about an hour. About 20 minutes in add the boiled vegetables and cooked fish back to the pot to let them soak up the sauce flavors. Stir regularly and add spices to taste.

Step 7: Ceebu jenn is usually accompanied by two sauces: tamarind and fish balls. We only did the tamarind sauce. To make this, first wash the tamarind carefully and place in its own bowl. Add some broth from the stew to the raw tamarind. Stir and add in about 1-2 cups of sugar, a couple of tablespoons of cider vinegar, and some ground spices.



Step 8: While doing all of this, you want to start cleaning and cooking the rice, which can take a while. First spread the dry rice grains out and sift through them to chuck any bad grains. Then add water and let them soak for a bit. Once the rice is cleaned, put it in large metal colander over a pot of boiling water so that the rice is steamed. If there is space between the colander and the pot, cover it with a wet piece of cloth to prevent the hot air from escaping, as shown in the photo to the right.

Step 9: By now the stew should have simmered for about 40 minutes. Using a spatula take out the fish, veggies, and the thick part of the sauce and put them aside. Once the rice is almost fully cooked, dunk it in the stew pot to cook in the remaining broth. Stir regularly and add spices to taste.




Step 10: Once the rice is fully cooked, spread it out on communal serving platters and place veggies and fish on the center of platters. Sprinkle the platters with stew sauce and present tamarind sauce on the side. Voila!



*Note: This is a very basic and probably slightly inaccurate recipe (inaccurate because I don't know all the names of the local ingredients and a lot of the procedure - timing, amounts - just comes with practice). Also to keep in mind, the process usually takes less time because the huge stew pot is placed on a butane burner which cooks everything a lot faster.

The end result turned out fabulously. I am in complete awe of women who do this every single day!