Tigernut Drink (Kunun Aya)
Tigernuts are not nuts. They are the small tubers of Cyperus esculentus, a sedge, and they have been eaten for a very long time: they were cultivated along the Nile and have been found in Egyptian tombs, which places them among the oldest documented foods on the continent. In Nigeria the drink made from them is kunun aya, a Hausa preparation from the north, where tigernuts are soaked, blended with dates or coconut and sometimes ginger, and strained into a sweet, creamy, faintly nutty drink. It is sold in bottles and bags across northern Nigeria and increasingly across the country, and it belongs to the same family of kunu drinks as kunun zaki and kunun gyada. The tuber also travelled. It spread through the Mediterranean and reached the Iberian peninsula under the Moors, where Valencia developed horchata de chufa, which is the same drink under a Spanish name and is now better known internationally than its African relative. The source for this recipe tells that Spanish story at length and never mentions kunun aya, which is a reasonable illustration of how African foods often reach the world labelled as something else.
Nigeria50 minLaila