Peanut sauce is popular around the world. You’ve probably dipped Thai- or Vietnamese-style grilled meats into it, or drizzled it over a plate of Indonesian gado-gado. In West Africa, though, peanut sauce is mostly served as part of a hearty stew, also known as mafé in Senegal.
The ubiquity of peanuts in Senegal is tied to its colonial history—when Europeans needed vast quantities of peanut and palm oil for maintaining steam engines and other machines during the 19th century industrial revolution, they forced Senegalese farmers to grow the legumes. At one point, Senegal was one of the world’s largest producer of peanuts.
Today, vendors can be seen on most street corners of our bustling capital city, selling a variety of peanut-based snacks, including chaaf, salty and crunchy sand-roasted, shelled peanuts; whole roasted saaf; mbahal, or boiled peanuts; and guerté soukeur, candied peanuts.
Peanuts are not just a snack, though; they’re an integral ingredient in the Senegalese kitchen. Peanut oil is the go-to for most of our cooking. Thanks to its high smoke point and slight nuttiness, it is ideal for frying fish or the black-eyed pea fritters called akara. We frequently reach for tigadegge, a dark roasted peanut paste that looks and tastes like peanut butter, and noflaye, a raw ground-peanut flour, to thicken stews and sauces, and impart its own unique flavor.
But mafé stands out as the most iconic of all our peanut-based fare. Made with peanut butter, tomato paste, onions, garlic, and bay leaf, it’s one of the mother sauces of African cuisine. This nutty concoction is a versatile partner for roast chicken, grilled fish, roasted vegetables, or just plain rice. My mother served it family-style on her large enamel platter, letting the ochre brown, velvety sauce flow generously over a bed of rice, fonio, or couscous made from millet. In the center, she’d spoon the meltingly tender morsels of lamb shoulder that slowly cooked in the unctuous peanut sauce, alongside silky cabbage, carrots, and chunks of sweet potato.
Photo by Elizabeth Coetzee, Food styling by Tiffany Schleigh