Recettes Nigeria

Amala

Amala is the swallow of the Yoruba southwest, and it is the darkest thing on a Nigerian table. Yam is peeled, cut, dried and milled into a flour called elubo, and the drying turns the white tuber brown. In boiling water that brown becomes near black, which is the colour amala is known by and which surprises people who expect a starch to be pale. Its home is Oyo State, and Ibadan in particular. The pairing of amala with ewedu, the jute leaf soup, is treated in Ibadan as something close to a civic institution, and the same seriousness attaches to it in Lagos, where you will not find a buka without it on the menu. Yoruba speakers make the comparison directly: amala and ewedu stand to an Ibadan person as akpu and ofe onugbu stand to an Igbo one. Three flours make three amala. Elubo isu, from yam, is the standard and gives the dark version. Lafun, from cassava, gives a white amala and is a different dish in practice. Elubo ogede, from unripe plantain, is lighter in colour and lower in starch. The technique is unforgiving in one specific way: the flour must go into water that has been taken off the heat, or it lumps, and lumps in amala are the fastest way to ruin it.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

20 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Beatrice · Africook

Easy Ways To Make Nigerian Pounded Yam

Pounded yam is white yam softened and then beaten until it becomes smooth, sticky and elastic, and it sits at the top of the Nigerian swallow hierarchy. Nigerians will argue about most things in their food and generally will not argue about this: iyan is what you serve when the occasion matters. The pounding is the dish. The yam is softened, transferred hot to a mortar and worked with a pestle until the structure breaks down completely and the mass turns stretchy, and there is a technique to it that varies between ethnic groups and is learned rather than described. It is hard physical work, traditionally done by women though not exclusively, and the sound of it carries. It is called iyan by the Yoruba, and the same or a closely related preparation is foutou in Côte d'Ivoire, fufu in Togo and Benin, and yam fufu in Ghana, which makes it one of the most widely made yam products in West Africa. Its texture is what distinguishes it from the rest of the swallow family: smoother than eba, more elastic than amala, and considerably more work than either. Food processors, blenders and hand mixers have made it accessible on a weeknight, and pounded yam flour has made it possible with no yam at all, which purists note without much affecting what happens in most kitchens.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Beatrice · Africook

Afang Soup

Afang soup belongs to the Efik and Ibibio people of Cross River and Akwa Ibom in southeastern Nigeria, and it is built on two vegetables that do quite different jobs. Afang, okazi to the Igbo, and known botanically as Gnetum africanum, is a tough, wiry forest leaf with a faintly bitter edge. It is sliced extremely finely, almost shredded, because whole it would be unpleasant to eat. Waterleaf is the counterweight: soft, quick to wilt, and full of moisture, which is what gives the soup its body without much added liquid. The pairing is the point, and it is what separates afang from edikang ikong, the other great vegetable soup of the same region. Edikang ikong uses waterleaf and ugu, the pumpkin leaf, and reads as sweeter and greener. Afang uses waterleaf and okazi, and carries that characteristic bitterness. People from the region can tell them apart instantly, and the leaf is the whole distinction. Around the vegetables sits an assortment that scales with the household budget, beef, shaki, dried and fresh fish, periwinkle, crayfish, palm oil, pepper. It is a soup that has long been read as a marker of a generous table, and it is served with any of the swallows.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

10 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Egg Sauce

Egg sauce is a Nigerian breakfast staple: eggs cooked into a base of tomato, onion and scotch bonnet until scrambled through it. It is what plain yam is most often eaten with, and it is one of the fastest hot meals in the Nigerian repertoire. What separates it from an omelette or from scrambled eggs is that the tomato base comes first. Onion and pepper are softened, tomatoes cooked down until they release their juices and soften, the seasoning goes in, and only then do the beaten eggs. The eggs are stirred through so the whole thing becomes one sauce rather than eggs with sauce on top. Two ingredients in this version are worth noticing. Sesame oil in place of vegetable oil is unusual in a Nigerian kitchen and gives a distinctly nutty background, and curry powder alongside is a Nigerian habit rather than an Indian one. Both are the contributor's choices rather than the standard. Egg sauce is genuinely close to what is elsewhere called egg stew, and the two names are used for much the same dish across Nigeria and Ghana, with the difference usually being consistency rather than method.

25 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook