When I was in fifth grade, my class teacher assigned us to a homework where we were tasked to write an essay about how to prepare our individual local dish by tribe.
I am Wollof so I had write about benachin or famously known as Gambian Jollof Rice.
I did not do the assignment on time and I got a beating of five canes on my left hand and another five on my right hand. Whew that teacher was wicked.
Selecting one local dish as my favorite is a bit hard considering how many good local dishes the Gambian community has. There’s domoda (made of mainly peanut butter), super kanja (made of mainly okra and green leaves), meat or chicken stew, grilled or fried chicken yassa, or sometimes fish, amongst many others.
While all of these individual dishes have their health benefits as well as their appetizing tastes that diverse them from each other, my all time favorite would be benachin. Maybe because it’s the first dish I learned how to cook, or because it’s my tribe’s local dish, I don’t know.
I do have immense love and cravings for chicken yassa, but it comes second to benachin.
There’s something about the aromatic manner in which benachin is prepared that comes to me therapeutically. When I am preparing it, I get really excited for no reason. When it is prepared for me, even if I was on a bad mood, I suddenly become a thrilled.
Food makes me really happy and as for benachin, it’s just the way it is all in one dish - not separated - and when it comes with its vegetables and the spices that are added to it during its preparation to give it its ideal taste. It just does something to my soul. It is one of those local dishes that get me excited. I could eat it three times a week and I would still eat it if it was presented to me the next day; that’s how much I love this dish.
Just like any other dish, there is something behind the way it is prepared that makes the dish supreme. Because I have consumed it from different households and different restaurants, I know that they have different taste and this sometimes depend on what type of benachin is cooked.
There’s benachin bu weh which translate to “white jollof rice” and it sounds so wrong that I am laughing as I type this. Then there’s benachin bu honha which translates to ”red jollof rice.“
(Some statements in local languages can never really be translated to English with justice to their meanings.)
And in each of those two, are options of fish, beef or chicken as the main meat of the dish.
I also admire how different people have different approaches to preparing the dish. That diversity of taste gives it an edge over other dishes.
If you’re really Gambian, you know there’s something very different about the benachin prepared at ceremonies. This is when it is cooked in ‘mbanda’ or bulk (if that makes sense) by more than two women. Those are one of the best versions of benachin you can ever have. If cooked right of course.
And God! I haven’t the slightest idea who the first person to prepare benachin was, but I pray Allah grants her heaven for blessing my life with such recipe.