National Dish · Fisherman's Rice
Thieboudienne (Ceebu Jën)
Photo: Mariel.cg / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Legend credits a single 19th-century Saint-Louis cook, Penda Mbaye, with inventing it after a shortage of imported rice forced her to improvise with local broken grains.
Fish stuffed with a garlic-parsley paste (roff) simmers with tomato, cassava, cabbage and carrots, and the flavorful broth is then used to cook the rice itself. Vendors and home cooks in Saint-Louis's Guet Ndar fishing quarter serve it from huge communal platters, often prized for the caramelized rice crust scraped from the bottom of the pot.
Why it's made this way: Saint-Louis's Guet Ndar fishing community, one of the busiest artisanal fishing grounds in West Africa, is widely credited as the birthplace of the dish in the 19th century, and UNESCO added it to its intangible cultural heritage list in 2021.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
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