Updated
March 12, 2001
Gambia
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English West African
Cookery
Ingredients
Every neighbourhood has its own 'cornershop' but markets with fresh foods
are everywhere.
There are more 'European' type super markets around the tourist coastal
area. Most ingredients can be purchased somewhere.
An amazing variety of fish
Butter Nut Squash
Sweet Potato
Eggplant
Red Chillies
The basis vegetable ingredients of many dishes are onions, sweet and bitter tomatoes, plantain (looking like green bananas but must be cooked), chili and black pepper, with many other vegetables that are in season.
Many of these ingredients are now readily available in UK supermarkets and if you are visiting London, Brixton market is the closest you can get to a Gambian market without going there.
Every Gambian market has baskets full of spices, garlic and dry ingredients like flour made from the likes of pounded millet, maize. Sweet potatoes are readily available and aubergine (Egg Plant) okra, spinach etc.
Curry powder is used sparingly, the hot spicy taste of Gambian dishes is frequently a mixture of chilli peppers and finely ground black pepper.
Ground nut oil and the reddy orange palm oil are used extensively.
Meat is available, Beef, Goat (sheep), and some pork but as 90% of Gambians are Muslim, pork is less available. Chickens are also found in the markets and are bought live, but super markets also have deep frozen.
Eggs are also readily available but are often hard boiled so check when you buy them if you want fresh, and always crack them onto a saucer before adding to you other ingredients.
Fresh fish is plentiful around the Atlantic coast, but dried and smoked fish is also everywhere, during their season the prawns are large and wonderfully flavoured and freshly caught each day.
If you enjoy oyster, these are also to be found in the markets, but they tend to be the smaller ones as the large ones go to the hotels and larger restaurants.
Each fruit has its season, oranges, mangoes, bananas, pawpaw, pineapples (imported) and coconuts, in the height of each season they are very cheaply available.
After the groundnut harvest when the nuts are fresh they are quite unlike the dried ones that we are used to. The inner skins are soft and translucent and the nuts sweet, tender and juicy. The nuts are sometimes lightly roasted giving them a different texture and flavour and the new crop around late October is sometimes boiled in the shell, which provides yet a different taste and texture to this valuable source of protein.
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