West Africa · Volume 22, The Three Glasses, the Mullet Run and the Grain Rolled by Hand
Lacciri haako
The Senegal river valley, the Haalpulaar and Soninke
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 25 sources in the brief
Lacciri haako is sorghum couscous (lacciri) under a sauce of cowpea leaves (haako) cooked with meat or fish and dried fish and thickened with ground peanut and melon seed: the river's dish. It is sold prepared in Nouakchott on Saturday evenings only and was once a village night dish, as a Moroccan outlet reported from the capital with a restaurateur, Djeynaba Ousmane Ba, a retired executive and a customer who drives twenty kilometres for it. It is liked, the report says, by the Peul, Soninke, Wolof and Bambara of Mauritania. No Haalpulaar or Soninke cook has been read, and the one community source that would carry the Soninke couscous and its sauces is not one this chapter reached.
As tradition built it
Serves a family. A Saturday evening.
Ingredients
The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.
- sorghum couscous, lacciri
- cowpea leaves
- meat or fish
- onion
- pepper
- to taste salt
- dried fish
- ground peanut
- ground melon seed
Method
- Roll and steam the sorghum couscous.
- Cook the leaves with the meat or fish, the onion, pepper and salt and the dried fish, and thicken the sauce with the ground peanut and melon seed.
- Serve the sauce over the couscous.
What a modern chef changes
The leaf sauce as a velouté of greens
Rung 2
Method
- Blanch the cowpea leaves, or spinach and amaranth where there are none, and blend half into the sauce for colour and body, keeping half whole.
- Roast the peanut and the melon seed before grinding, and no source says whether the river's cooks do.
- Smoke the dried fish on the Egg for ten minutes before it goes in, which gives the depth a Senegalese guedj carries.
- Steam the sorghum grain twice and butter it; a Soninke cook will know whether that is right, and we would like to be told.