Changes

Now the problem is, I couldn’t find any mention of, let alone a recipe for, this supposed West African “chop-chop” dish. A spice by the name “pima” does not exist either (I mean, it doesn’t exist on the Internet, but that’s as good as not existing at all). Did Mr. Borysowicz misremember the names? Or did he repeat names that had been already butchered by the Gryf fishermen? In West African Pidgin English, the word ''chop'' means simply “food” or “to eat”. So is it possible that the fishermen were treated to a local delicacy by someone who encouraged them by saying, “eat food”, and the Poles took it to be the name of the dish? If we want to identify it, we may have to try a different approach.

Instead of searching by the name, let’s try to search by ingredients. Is there a West African dish made from rice, fish, tomato paste and hot spices? Yes, it turns out there is! It’s the national dish of Senegal, also popular in other West African countries, which goes by the name spelled ''ceebu jën'' in Wolof and ''thiéboudienne'' in French; it’s pronounced roughly ''cheh-<small>BOO</small>-djen'' and means simply “rice with fish”. To make it, you take an Atlantic fish called dusky grouper, cut it into steaks and stuff each one with finely chopped parsley, onion and garlic. Then you sauté vegetables (onion, chili pepper, potatoes, African eggplant, okra) with tomato paste and possibly a dried sea snail called ''Cymbium olla'' (also known as “Senegalese camembert” due it its pungent smell). Then you add water and cook the fish steaks in this soup. Once it’s cooked, you remove the fish and the veggies from the pot and replace them with some rice to let it absorb all of the broth. The fish and the veggies are served on the rice.

Okay, and what about the “pima”? This happens to be quite easy: the mysterious spice appears to be nothing more than a Polish phonetic spelling of ''piment'', the French word for a chili pepper.

But how much in common does the Senegalese dish of large chunks of fish and vegetables served on a bed of rice have with the Polish can filled with a “firm paste” that may be “juicy” or “slightly dryish” and whose surface may be covered with “a film of oil” (the quotations are from the [https://www.gov.pl/web/rolnictwo/paprykarz-szczecinski website of the Polish Ministry of Agriculture])?

Well, the birth of PS2 is directly linked to an efficiency improvement project whose goal was to find some use for the scraps left over from cutting large blocks of frozen fish on Gryf’s freezer trawlers. Forget about entire steaks, which wouldn’t have fit into the cans anyway. The cans were packed with finely ground fish scraps (sometimes with fins, scales and all) and Bulgarian tomato pulp; only rice grains were visible with a naked eye.