You must travel a lot with your work, eating in all sorts of places. Yes, and now I’m grown up I am very easygoing with food. I never have any particular requests and will eat anything. What is your favourite Senegalese dish? Definitely thieboudienne, a traditional dish made from rice, fish and a rich, spicy tomato sauce with onions, carrots, cabbage, cassava and peanut oil. I also love Yassa, a popular, spicy West African chicken dish cooked with lots of onions and lemon juice. our brother owns a restaurant in France, Y is that right? Yes, we own it together. It’s in the north of France in a place called Amiens, just over 100 miles from Paris. He’s more involved than I am – I just help him when I’m around. I love food, but don’t have the passion for cooking that he does. I know how to present it, though. Serving food is a big passion for me and I have always worked in restaurants, both across Europe and in America. I ended up opening a small caférestaurant in Senegal in 2010, actually. an you pass on a nice recipe from your C restaurant in France? Yes, here’s one for a typical Senegalese fish and rice dish. Bon appétit! Serves 4 1kg lean fish such as hake tbsp of tomato paste 100g dried fish (see what you can find in your local market) peanut oil 1 green pepper 3 small red chillies 1kg rice 200g carrots 200g sweet potatoes 200g turnips 200g aubergine 1 small cabbage 3 onions parsley Cut the fish into chunks and, in each piece, make two holes. Prepare a stuffing by pounding together one onion, a bunch of parsley and one chilli with some salt in a pestle and mortar. Fill the holes you have made in the fish with this mixture. Fry the fish pieces in peanut oil and, once browned, remove from pan and rest on some kitchen paper. Add the remaining onions, chopped, to the saucepan and colour them. Add the tomato paste – dissolved in a little water – and bring to a fast boil. Add the vegetables – peeled, and either left whole or chopped, depending on their size – and the dried fish pieces. Cover everything with water, season with salt and pepper, and simmer covered for 30 minutes. Add your browned fish back into
the pan, and simmer for a further 30 minutes. 40 minutes before the end of cooking, add the rice.
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aurence Chauvin-Buthaud is the Parisianbased fashion designer behind menswear fashion label Laurenceairline. Her designs speak of myriad influences, from graphic African prints to Scottish plaids and Japanese polka dots. She has a knack for applying a sleek, sophisticated construction to beautiful African textiles, and avoids the ‘tribal’ clichés so often associated with African fashion. Instead, Laurenceairline – who are stocked across the world – likes to re-imagine Africa’s cultural inheritance in a modern, international way. Chauvin-Buthaud often works from a workshop on the Ivory Coast, where she was born, and teaches local employers couture sewing techniques. The profits from her collections are invested back into the company, to continue building stable learning centres, teaching fashion skills to help encourage future businesses. aurence, although you were born in L Africa, you spent much of your childhood in Switzerland before you moved to Paris. What kind of food did you eat? Well, when I was growing up in Switzerland my mom cooked both African and European food. I have very fond memories of her cassava and plantain fritters. hat do you eat when you’re on the Ivory W Coast at your workshop? When I’m working on collections, I like to eat steamed tropical vegetables. I’m particularly fond of steamed sweet potatoes along with a traditional dish from the Ivory Coast, Garba, which consists of fried tuna with cassava semolina. ou love to cook, right? What’s your Y favourite thing to make? I love it, but I don’t have a particular dish I love to make. I prefer to invent new recipes. Cooking for me is very creative, similar to the process of working on fashion collections; I mix colours, tastes and textures to create something surprising and tasty. hat are the typical staples of Ivorian W cuisine? ‘Sauce graine’, a red sauce made from palm seeds, is a very typical Ivorian staple, and famous across all of West Africa. There’s also ‘sauce arachide’ which is basically a peanut purée. Then there’s the plantain, which is like an Ivorian celebrity: it’s everywhere! It can be cooked so many different ways, too. Do you have a recipe you can share? Yes, it’s a very simple dish, barely even a recipe. It’s for my mom’s plantain fritters, which are almost like donuts. You make a mix of 50% grated cassava and 50% very ripe plantain, roll them into balls and then fry them in hot oil. That’s it! They’re a great accompaniment to spicy dishes.
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