“For us women, flavor is king”: Gender, saf sap and flavor work in urban Senegal

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the past decade home cooking in the Senegalese city of Dakar has come to be dominated by culinary practices of saf sap: the incorporation of new commodities and flavor enhancers and the invention of new cooking techniques that intensify the taste of everyday dishes. Producing a well flavored meal is a crucial part of women’s domestic work, but cooks are increasingly critiqued in Dakar, accused of traducing culinary heritage, challenging the authority of elders, and spreading metabolic disease. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegalese households and qualitative interviews and focus groups with women who prepare food, I introduce the analytical category of “flavor work” to show how the everyday making of taste in a West African city is embedded in historical and contemporary forms of household social reproduction. Controversy over the taste of home cooking reveals how women’s flavor work serves a double reproductive purpose. Flavor work creates culturally coherent and intelligible meals, but it also forms part of broader subsistence strategies: techniques for navigating scarcity and rupture.