A Memorable Weekend
So last Saturday was an exciting day, as I hosted a nine-year old friend from the nearby island of Goree. I was not entirely sure how it would go, as we’d never spent quite so much time together before, plus there is a bit of a language barrier (her native language is Wolof, see ), but I wanted to introduce her to my world since I had been a frequent visitor to hers.
I met her at the ferry depot and she then took her first taxi ride ever (her usual means of transportation is of course the car rapide), so she peered rapturously out the window the entire time. She was fascinated when we came to the school in which I live, too, no doubt imagining herself seated behind one of the little wooden desks or playing in the yard at recess.
We then went to the beach around the corner from me, at the surf school at the Ngor restaurant, where the water can be quite rough. My little friend was cautious, as she does not know how to swim, though we did splash in the waves a bit. When she spied her first ‘chapeau de chinois’ (apparently these are called ‘limpets’ in English and are a type of saltwater snail. I had never heard of them before, but the locals enjoy eating them), she at once became very industrious, prying an inordinate number of them off the rocks and wrapping them solicitously in a tissue.
I cautiously asked her what she intended to do with them. “Take them home and cook them, of course!’ she responded brightly. “Oh,” I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to find ways to distract her enough so that she would forget to take them home, but she was astonishingly single-minded about it: she was a girl with a mission.
Once we arrived home, she set the dread things to boil and said that we must have a ‘sauce’ to accompany them, a ‘sauce’ that accompanies a variety of different Senegalese dishes. It consists of chopped raw onion, mustard, vinegar, lime juice, salt, pepper, and Maggi (a sort of consommé cube that is basically pure MSG, used in virtually every dish throughout the country, including the famous tangana sandwiches). Despite what you may think, it was absolutely delicious and the perfect accompaniment to our, um, sea snails. As she was chopping the onions on my counter (which she was just tall enough to reach), she spied a little plastic bag full of ‘pain de singe,’ or monkey bread, and gleefully announced that she would now prepare a local drink called bouye. She added soursop extract, milk and banana to make a truly luscious beverage and beamed shyly when I told her how impressed I was with her mastery in the kitchen – I had been matter-of-factly relegated to the role of spectator, which was perfectly fine by me.
