Recettes

Simple Pasta Salad Recipe (With Video)

The mayonnaise dressed vegetable salad is a fixture of the Nigerian party table, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is not a salad in the European sense at all. There are no leaves at the centre of it. It is built on cooked vegetables, sweetcorn, egg and sometimes macaroni or baked beans, bound in mayonnaise and evaporated milk, and it is served cold in a large bowl alongside jollof rice and fried plantain. It arrived through colonial and post independence British influence on Nigerian catering, and it has been thoroughly domesticated since. The evaporated milk in the dressing is the clearest marker of that: it is not a British addition, and it gives the dressing a sweetness and a thinner consistency than mayonnaise alone. Nigerians of a certain age associate it directly with owambe, the large celebration parties where the food is served in quantity. This particular recipe is a contemporary quick version rather than a documented traditional dish. It uses macaroni, carrot, peas, sweetcorn, lettuce and egg with a mayonnaise and milk dressing, and it is presented by its author as an everyday meal rather than as party food. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to that broader Nigerian salad practice; what cannot be established from the source is any particular lineage for the recipe itself.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

35 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Amako Blessing · Africook

Fluffy Pancakes

The thick, risen pancake is a North American and British form rather than an African one, and the source for this recipe says so directly: it describes itself as a basic UK recipe. It is included here as a plain reference version, not as a dish with a claim on the continent. That distinction matters because Africa has its own pancakes and they are not this. The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and deliberately savoury, carrying onion and ground pepper in the batter alongside the sugar. Hausa masa is a fermented rice cake, spongy and slightly sour, cooked in a pan of round wells. Ethiopian injera is a fermented teff flatbread that functions as a plate. Each of those is a distinct thing with its own technique and its own place at a table. What this recipe offers is the baking powder raised, egg and milk enriched, butter cooked pancake that most of the world now recognises from breakfast menus. It is genuinely good and genuinely simple, and there is no reason not to make it. There is also no reason to describe it as African cooking, and the honest position is to present it as what it is.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Asaro (Nigerian Yam Porridge)

Asaro is yam cooked down in a seasoned pepper base with palm oil until part of it collapses into a thick, orange-red mash while some pieces stay whole. It comes from the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria and is now eaten across the country. The texture is the dish. Mashing all of it gives you something closer to a purée; leaving it all in pieces gives you yam in sauce. Asaro is deliberately between the two, enough breaks down to thicken everything, enough survives to give you something to bite. The palm oil is not incidental either: it supplies the colour and a distinct earthy richness that no other oil reproduces. There is a naming point the source raises and gets broadly right. What Nigerians call porridge is closer to what English calls pottage, a thick one-pot dish of a starch cooked with vegetables and sometimes meat, rather than the European breakfast sense of a grain cooked in liquid. The two words are used interchangeably in Nigeria. The source also identifies mpotompoto as the Ghanaian counterpart. The dishes are close relatives rather than the same thing, and that has been noted rather than asserted as fact.

1 hr 10 minEasyNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · 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