Peanut Butter

People in my region eat a lot of peanut sauce (my family has some sort of peanut sauce with rice for lunch every day) and that means that people make a lot of peanut butter (called tiga diga) which is a key ingredient. To make peanut butter they dry, shell, and roast the peanuts over the fire, and then pound and roll them into a paste. 

My family has a grinder (it looks like something you'd use to make sausage) but it's been broken for awhile now. 

The days of grinding peanuts into butter

Since the grinder's out of commission they take the roasted peanuts, pound them with a pestle in a big wooden mortar, and then they get glass bottle and a very flat rock or a thin slab of smooth tile and roll the pounded nuts into a very smooth butter. 

Mariama Gaulo making tiga diga

It's good, if you like unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter, which I do. My family only uses peanut butter to make sauce, and so when they found out that I like to put it on bread for breakfast (which is fantastic with bananas when I can find them) they balked a little. I figure they feel about my peanut butter sandwiches the same way that I feel about their straight-up mayonnaise sandwiches -- bismillah, to each their own, but I will stick with what I've got, thanks. 

Peanuts

Honestly, before coming to Senegal I had only a vague idea of what peanuts looked like before they were roasted and salted or ground up for sandwiches. This is what peanut plants look like. They're all over the place here, and they tend to be about knee-high, but can get bigger. 

(Thanks, Wikipedia.)

This is a little bunch of raw, just-dug peanuts that one of my host brothers handed me a few weeks ago, like a little bouquet. 

The peanuts are roasted by a few of the small boys, who make a bed of coals from smoldering corn husks and cobs that they've scavenged and then push the raw peanuts into the embers, charring the shells, singeing their fingers, making me nervous. 

To me raw peanuts taste unripe, almost sour, like something you'd feed a hamster, but these peanuts were fresh, a wonderful new kind of taste I had trouble describing -- like, what airplane peanuts are to these peanuts what sushi is to canned tuna. (I like canned tuna, but it's a whole different deal.) 

They tasted warm and fresh and clean, they had a green bright flavor and a rich meaty crunch that made me think of standing in the sunshine, eating a BLT. I was hungry, and they were delicious.