Kedjenou layer (canari steam-braise) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Kédjénou is a West African dish in which a sealed clay pot, the canari, is inverted over charcoal and left to cook on the steam that rises from its own contents, with no water or oil added. Its old layer is the plainest stage of the dish, before tomato, onion and the other vegetables of New World origin had entered it.

The main ingredient is chicken, and in some areas guinea fowl or game was used as well. These were meats long established in central Côte d'Ivoire, foods that had been within reach in the life of the land from early on. The ingredients that make up the old layer of kédjénou were there in the land from the start.

What gives the dish its character is the steaming craft. A lidded clay pot is set inverted over the charcoal, and without any water added from outside, the meat is cooked through by the steam of its own juices. To keep it from catching, the pot is not opened but shaken so the contents mix. The dish's name, kédjénou, is said to come from the Baule word for that gentle shaking motion — secouer.

The people who carried this craft came from the east. The Baule, fleeing a dispute over royal succession among the Asante (an Akan people) of what is now Ghana, moved west, settled between the Comoé and Bandama rivers and founded a kingdom in the mid-eighteenth century. From that settlement onward, the old layer of kédjénou is thought to have taken shape as a pot dish of the land.

Many picture kédjénou as a pot simmering red with tomato. From that image comes a view that the present stewed form is an old dish carried unchanged from the Baule migration of the eighteenth century.

But that does not hold. The tomato that the present kédjénou depends on is a New World crop, and it spread through West Africa only much later. The Cambridge journal History in Africa (2014) states that there is no evidence tomatoes were cultivated in West Africa before the nineteenth century. Until the tomato crossed the sea and took root in West African fields, the red-simmered kédjénou had no way of coming into being. What reaches back to older times is the craft of inverting a clay pot to steam, not the present, tomato-bearing form.

The migration that brought that craft west is on record. A standard reference work relates that the Baule moved from the Asante lands to central Côte d'Ivoire following the succession struggle after the death of the Asantehene Opoku Ware I in 1750, travelling west under the leadership of Queen Aura Pokou. In this old layer, dish name, technique, people, language and land line up along a single thread, and it marks out the shape of a plainer kédjénou that came before the tomato stew.

The name kédjénou is said to come from the Baule word for that shaking motion, though how the word is put together in Baule is not known in detail.