Benachin

As tradition built it

Serves 6. About 1 hour 30.

Ingredients

The method as the tradition gives it, ingredients named but not yet weighed. Quantities follow as we verify them, lead dishes first.

• 1 whole fish, stuffed with rof as in dish 1
• 2 onions
• 400 g tomatoes, plus concentrate
• 60 ml palm oil
• cassava, sweet potato, bitter aubergine, cabbage
• 800 g rice

Method

1. Soften the onion in the palm oil, add the tomato and concentrate, and reduce hard.
2. Add water and the harder root vegetables: cassava, sweet potato and bitter aubergine.
3. Add the stuffed fish, cook through, and lift out.
4. Add the cabbage.
5. Add the rice to the same coloured, fat-rich liquid and let it absorb entirely, exactly the ceebu jën logic with palm oil in place of the fish-and-guedj base.
6. The crust at the very bottom is prized, not discarded, caramelised dark, crisp and faintly smoky.

What a modern chef changes

The same xoon discipline as ceebu jën, with palm oil's own carotenoid chemistry to manage

Rungs 1 and 2

Method

1. Treat the palm oil in two stages, a little early for depth, more stirred through late for colour and aroma, since red palm oil's carotenoids degrade under sustained heat exactly as they do everywhere else in this atlas.
2. The crust rules from Rung 1 apply without modification. A flat, heavy pot, no stirring in the final minutes.