Desayuno

When the afternoon sun is at its most vicious; and you are beginning to seriously second guess that distant ancestor who first crawled out of the sea onto the hot, dry shore; and you have been having fantasies of some kind of stellar catastrophe ejecting your home planet into the cold, soothing void of space; it is time for a tall glass of my favorite Senegalese drink: gingembre.

I had ordered gingembre in restaurants several times when I was last in Senegal, but I had never had it homemade, or seen the process myself. I had my chance to do both last week, when, after complimenting our neighbors on the gingembre they offered us while we were visiting one evening, they offered to teach Teresa and me how to make it.

We came equipped with a mortar and pestle which was quickly deemed inadequate by the mother of the family. (She tasted it to be sure, but said that it was too new, and that if we used it the gingembre would end up tasting like the wood.) Luckily, they were able to borrow and aluminum model from another neighbor to lend us for the lesson.

The recipe is simple. No boiling, no fancy ingredients. Just a pound of peeled, fresh ginger root smashed into tiny pieces and poured into a three or four liter bucket of cold, clean water to steep. (I think the small Senegalese ginger roots are hotter than the ginger I am used to from American supermarkets, but the recipe should still work just fine.) There is a certain amount of technique necessary to pound the ginger to a pulp without it flying out of the mortar and all over the ground. If you have the luxury of a few minutes to practice, you should get the hang of it fairly quickly. In our case, there was a very disapproving little girl who sighed with exasperation and took the pestle away from us to do it herself.

After you have pounded all the ginger very small and scooped it into your bucket of cold water, let it sit and steep for five minutes. If you need something to do to pass the time, try to have a conversation by asking your girlfriend to translate something from English into French so that the neighbor can translate it from French into Wolof so that you can ask the neighbor’s mother if that was really mayonnaise she just made with nothing but a large bowl, an egg, some oil, and her fingers.

After the ginger has steeped, you are just a strainer away from having finished gingembre concentrate. Add sugar and additional water to taste (I like it strong and lightly sweet, but you will have to experiment to find the balance you like) and serve very cold when necessary to prevent excessive grumpiness due to high temperatures.

I have not yet tried it, but the neighbor says that half a lemon squeezed into each liter of finished gingembre is excellent.

Posted by Tom