West Africa · Volume 01, The Wolof-Mandinka World

Caldou

Name: Caldou
Total time: 30 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Senegal & Gambia
Ingredients: 2 whole firm fish; 800 g rice, cooked separately, plain; 1 tomato; 1 diakhatou (bitter aubergine); 6 okra; 3 limes, juiced; 30 g guedj; 1 chilli, whole; 40 ml oil

Casamance

Illustration

Time: 30 minutes

Researched: Researched from 160 sources in the brief
Reviewed: Awaiting a reader from inside the tradition
Cooked: Awaiting a cook report

Where ceebu jën cooks the rice inside the sauce, caldou keeps a clean, sharp broth and pours it over rice at the point of eating, so the citrus stays bright rather than mellowed.

by Casamance

The Sahel droughts of 1968 to 1974 and 1983 to 1985 hit the Fulani pastoral economy of Fouta Toro exactly as they hit the herds further east, pushing pastoralists towards town and market dependency. The Maggi cube, invented by the Swiss Julius Maggi in 1886, arrived in West Africa in the 1960s via Nestlé and was a kitchen staple across urban Senegal by the 1980s, earning the affectionate nickname corrige madame, "corrects madam," now near universal in the household formula for nearly every sauce in this chapter. The Casamance conflict, an armed insurgency running since December 1982, has left landmines restricting access to farmland, salinised abandoned fields, and is estimated to have cut regional agricultural production by roughly 50 per cent. It is directly relevant to how this chapter itself could be researched: field-level detail on Diola rice technique and household variation in caldou is thinner in the accessible record than it should be for a region this culturally distinct, precisely because thirty years of intermittent insecurity have made sustained fieldwork difficult there.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 30 minutes.

Ingredients

2 whole firm fish
800 g rice, cooked separately, plain
1 tomato
1 diakhatou (bitter aubergine)
6 okra
3 limes, juiced
30 g guedj
1 chilli, whole
40 ml oil

Method

Soften the onion and crushed tomato in the oil, two to three minutes.
Add the okra, diakhatou, rinsed guedj and water, seasoned with the lime juice, salt and pepper.
Lower in the whole fish and the whole chilli, and simmer 15 to 20 minutes until just cooked.
Boil the rice separately, plain, until tender but not sticky.
A green accompanying sauce, beugueuthie, is made by mashing sorrel leaves with a little okra from the broth and more lime juice, whisked smooth.
To serve, plate the rice, set the fish on top, ladle the broth generously over, and serve the green sauce alongside.

What a modern chef changes

The broth clarified, and the acid protected rather than cooked down

Rung 6

Method

Strain the broth through muslin before serving, so the citrus reads as clean and bright rather than cloudy.
Add the lime juice in two stages, most at the start for the fish to cook in, a final measure off the heat just before serving, protecting the top note the way Rung 4's yassa logic protects onion.
Choose the fish for structure, Rung 6, exactly as for ceebu jën: this dish depends on a whole fish holding together through a simmer, not on a specific species.