Let’s be clear right off the bat – it’s THE Gambia.  Not “A” Gambia. Not “Some” Gambia. Not “His Excellency, Rear Admiral Gambia, Esquire.”  Nope.  THE Gambia.

Leigh went to THE Ohio State University, so we’re used to mandatory definite articles. In the case of Gambia, the reason for the specificity is because the leadership of the country were tired of their mail being misdelivered to Zambia.  

I am not making this up.

So what are we making from the smallest country on the African mainland?  A beef and peanut stew called Domada. We’ve made at least two other peanut stews from Africa on this project, from the Central African Republic and Chad.  This one, however, turned out a bit differently.

For starters, this one used sweet potatoes.  Now, tubers are a complicated and contentious topic.  It takes a lot of research and careful comparison of sources to understand the difference between different kinds of sweet potatoes, yams, and other starchy tubers like cassava and taro, and to identify which one is ACTUALLY most likely to turn up in dishes in a particular locale.

We didn’t do any research.  We just bought this monster and went with it.

I normally scale the pictures down to make them fit the text better, but I’m going to leave this one big, just to help you appreciate the size of this thing.

Other than the giant tuber, there’s not much else to show here as far as preparation – you first sauté onions, because it really doesn’t matter WHERE in the world you are cooking – at least half of ALL recipes start with sautéing onions.   It’s pretty striking.

Look – here’s a picture of some onions.  Guess if it’s from THIS recipe or some other one!

It’s from this one – we have SOME integrity.  But once the onions are ready, you just throw everything else into the pot and let it go for an hour, so not a lot of other pictures.

“Everything else” in this case being peanut butter, a few tomatoes, a scotch bonnet pepper, and a the entire cubed sweet potato, along with the beef.

It’s an opaque stew, so not a lot to see in the picture.  Here it is served over rice:

Also, while I’ve been very glib in this writeup, I don’t want to sell this stew short – of the various African peanut stews we’ve made so far, this one probably came out the best!  The sauce thickened up really nicely, and the overall flavor was hearty and filling.

Nice the job, The Gambia! Your the stew is quite the good!

Next up, Georgia, although that will likely be delayed a few weeks as we move into our new apartment.

Recipe:
Domoda

As we leave the Fs for the Gs, we also leave the terrifyingly well documented food culture of France for the much less well documented food culture of West Africa.

And we’re going to be here for a bit – in addition to Gabon, we have The Gambia (which may be what inspired THE Ohio State), Ghana, Guinea, and Guinea Bissau.  These are all pretty small countries, and a lot of the borders are artifacts of colonialism rather than reflective of any sort of cultural or (certainly) culinary boundaries.

Which means that the national dish of Gabon is the same as the national dish of the Republic of the Congo AND of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Having already made that, what else can we do?

There’s not much online specifically about Gabonese food.  The consensus seems to be that the French colonial influence is still a bit more pronounced in Libreville than it was in Kinshasa or Brazzaville.  As such, one of the dishes that gets mentioned a lot is Mustard Chicken.  (If it has a specific local name, other than something like “Poulet à la Moutarde”, I haven’t found it.)

Everyone seems to be working off the same basic recipe, which I can trace back to a first posting on Celtnet.org.uk, a site that no longer even exists.  So while there are easily half a dozen posts on “Gabonese Mustard Chicken,” if that original poster to Celtnet was full of nonsense, then so is everyone else.

Fortunately, the recipe is pretty basic, so there’s not a lot of weird places for inauthentic embellishments.  No fermented black bean paste or herring here.

In fact, the ingredients list is SUPER short – garlic, onions (SO MANY onions), lemon juice, mustard, and a chicken.  We got smart this time and bought the chicken already cut into pieces.

And by “mustard”, I mean the ENTIRE JAR of mustard.

A quick sear in oil, and then you just put everything in a pot to steam for an hour.

Foil added to trap steam.  When it’s done, you serve it over rice:

I apologize for the slightly vertiginous camera angle here.

And – that’s it.  This is one of those meals where the intro takes a LOT more words than the cooking, because it’s so simple.

That said – this was pretty darn tasty.  The chicken was nice and juicy from the steaming, and the best part was the onions that had soaked up all the mustard.  Especially when you got a little of everything on your fork, this was a great tasting stew, and would be an excellent choice for a weeknight meal where you wanted to have some leftovers.

We also made dessert.  The one thing everyone brings up on recipe blogs is how much they liked Gabonese baked bananas.  And it is ALWAYS bananas, even though I’m pretty sure you’d be MUCH more likely to run into plantains in Gabon.  I’m guessing there’s once again a single Platonic ur-recipe floating around out there somewhere that didn’t make the distinction.

But given that we LIKE bananas a lot more than plantains, we didn’t really try that hard to disprove the choice of ingredient.

“Baked bananas” is a bit of a half truth, to be honest – they ARE baked, sure, but only after being battered and fried.  The batter is bread crumbs (panko, once again, since we need to use these things up) held on with a mix of egg and orange juice.

They’re fried until crispy and golden, then you put them in the oven for five minutes to… cook?…warm?… mildly annoy?… the insides.  I’m just not sure what five minutes in the oven realistically accomplished.  But who cares – these puppies were delicious!

Topped with brown sugar and sour cream, they were a great mix of sweet, crunchy, and just a bit tart. I would definitely serve these to friends.

And that’s it for Gabon – no three day preparation, and little to no certainty about authenticity, but tasty food nonetheless.

Next up, THE Gambia!

Postscript: While trying to find the original URLs I used for these recipes, I think I found the origin point – a cookbook by Dyfed Lloyd Evans called “The Recipes of Africa.” BUT – it turns out Evans is the guy that ran the Celtnet website, so it’s once again back to that same source of unknown accuracy.

Recipes:
Mustard Chicken
Baked Bananas