Sauce d'arachide

the groundnut sauce of the Bight of Benin, ground nuts cooked down with tomato and chilli until the oil rises red on the surface

Origin: Southern Benin & the Bight of Benin

From the journey of Peanut.

Groundnut sauce is the common currency of West African cooking, and every country along the coast makes a version of it. What separates the Beninese one is restraint: no smoked fish in the base, no vegetables cooked into a pulp, and a sauce reduced far enough that the groundnut oil separates and rises in a red film across the top. That separation is the cook's signal, exactly as it is in a karahi or a good curry, and a sauce served before it happens is considered unfinished. The groundnut itself is American, carried across the Atlantic by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, and it took to the West African soil so completely that within two hundred years it had displaced the indigenous Bambara groundnut across most of the region. The sauce it produced is older in form than in content: the technique of thickening a stew with a ground oily seed was already there, applied to egusi and to the Bambara nut, and the newcomer simply slid into a structure waiting for it. It is eaten across the Fon and Yoruba south of Benin and identically across the border in Togo, where the two countries share a coastline, a language map, and a kitchen that the border drawn between them in 1885 did nothing to divide.

Ingredients

  • 250 g unsalted roasted peanuts, or 200g smooth unsweetened peanut butter
  • 800 g beef or goat, cut into 4cm pieces
  • 3 tbsp red palm oil or groundnut oil
  • 2 onions, one chopped and one sliced
  • 4 tomatoes, chopped
  • 2 tbsp tomato purée
  • 3 scotch bonnet chillies, whole
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 thumb of ginger, grated
  • 1 litre water or light stock
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste

Method

  1. If starting from whole nuts, grind the peanuts to a smooth paste in a food processor, stopping to scrape down the sides. It will pass through a crumb stage before the oil releases and it turns to paste. Loosen with 200ml of warm water to a pourable cream.
  2. Heat the oil in a heavy pot and brown the meat on all sides in batches. Set aside.
  3. Fry the chopped onion, garlic, and ginger in the same pot until soft and lightly coloured, about eight minutes.
  4. Add the tomatoes and tomato purée and cook down hard for ten minutes, until the mixture darkens and thickens.
  5. Return the meat, add the water, the whole scotch bonnets, and the salt. Simmer covered for thirty minutes.
  6. Stir the loosened peanut paste into the pot in a thin stream. From this point stir every few minutes: groundnut sauce catches and burns on the base without warning, and a burnt sauce cannot be rescued.
  7. Simmer uncovered for a further twenty-five to thirty minutes, until the meat is tender and a red oil separates and rises across the surface. That film is the sign the sauce is ready.
  8. Lift out the chillies unless you want real heat, and crush one back in if you do. Taste for salt. Scatter the sliced onion over and serve with rice, akassa, or pounded yam.

Notes

Natural peanut butter with no added sugar or palm fat is a fair substitute for grinding your own, but the sweetened commercial kind will ruin the dish. The whole scotch bonnets perfume the sauce without releasing much heat as long as their skins stay unbroken; breaking one is a deliberate act. Stirring is not optional in the last half hour.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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