maafe

Maafe is the Wolof spelling of West Africa's most traveled groundnut stew, made by cooks in Senegal and The Gambia who shaped it into something distinct from the Mandinka mafé to the east. The Wolof people of Senegal's Atlantic coast adopted groundnut cultivation after Portuguese traders brought Arachis hypogaea from Brazil in the sixteenth century, and their cooks had developed a version of the stew by the eighteenth century with its own character. The double-a spelling reflects the Wolof long vowel, a phoneme that French orthography consistently collapsed into a single letter. In written Wolof, the length matters: maafe is not the same word as mafe.

Saint-Louis, the French colonial capital on the Senegalese coast, is the city where maafe first entered written records in its Wolof form, around the 1880s. Wolof-speaking cooks in the colonial household economy prepared it for both African and European tables, often thinning the peanut base with stock to suit French palates. Linguist Pathé Diagne noted in his 1971 survey of Wolof culinary vocabulary that maafe was one of thirty food terms borrowed by French-speaking Senegalese without translation. The word passed into everyday Senegalese French exactly as spelled, long vowel and all.

What distinguishes Wolof maafe from its Mandinka cousin is technique rather than ingredients. Wolof cooks traditionally brown the onions and meat first in a dry pot before adding the peanut paste, building a darker, nuttier base. In the Casamance region, cooks add fermented locust bean (soumbala) for depth; in Dakar, they often leave it out. Food anthropologist Mireille Rosello documented in 2004 how Dakar families use the Sunday maafe as a measure of a cook's skill, judging the dish by the clarity of the oil that rises to the surface.

Maafe traveled to France with Senegalese migrants in the 1970s and 1980s, entering Parisian food consciousness through restaurants in the Château Rouge and Belleville neighborhoods. By 2010, it appeared in mainstream French culinary writing, spelled alternately maafe, mafé, and mafe. The Wolof spelling held in Senegalese diaspora writing, a quiet insistence on the long vowel that French orthography kept dropping. Today it is the form preferred by Senegalese food writers and the spelling most commonly used in West African cookbooks published in English.