Recettes

Nyama Choma

Nyama choma is Swahili for roasted meat, and the name is the entire description. Goat is the meat of choice in Kenya, cooked over charcoal at a low heat for hours, seasoned in its most orthodox form with nothing but salt. The restraint is deliberate: the dish is a test of the meat and the fire rather than of a marinade. It is eaten on occasions rather than on weekdays. A weekend family gathering, a celebration, an afternoon that has been set aside for it. Nyama choma comes with ugali and kachumbari, the raw tomato and onion salad whose acidity cuts the fat, and the three together form a plate that is recognised across Kenya and Tanzania without variation in its structure. The social arrangement around it is as fixed as the plate. The grilling is done outdoors and generally by men, standing around the fire, eating as they go and talking for as long as the meat takes. The meat is pulled from the bone with the fingers. Nyama choma is not a dish that is prepared and then served; the preparation is the event, and it is not designed to be hurried.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

2 hr 40 minMediumKenya

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Doro Wat (Ethiopian Spiced Chicken)

Doro Wat is Ethiopia's most celebrated dish, a deeply spiced, slow-cooked chicken stew made with the country's signature berbere spice blend and niter kibbeh (Ethiopian spiced clarified butter), enriched with whole boiled eggs that absorb the complex, fiery sauce as they cook. It is the dish that defines Ethiopian cuisine for the world. Preparing Doro Wat properly requires patience. Caramelising a large quantity of onions for up to an hour in niter kibbeh forms the foundation, this long-cooked onion base is what gives the stew its extraordinary depth and the sauce its thick, velvet-like body. The berbere adds heat, complexity, and colour. The result is one of the most flavourful chicken dishes in the world.

HardEthiopia

Recette de Nympha · Africook

South African Pig Trotters (Maquina)

Pig trotters are the foot of the pig, and what they offer is skin, tendon and collagen rather than muscle. Cooked slowly they break down into something gelatinous and rich that thickens its own liquid, and in South Africa they are eaten both as a full meal with gravy and picked at with the fingers. The dish carries a name that shifts even within its own source: maquina in the title, manquina in the text. That kind of variation is common with foods that live in speech rather than in cookbooks, and trotters have lived in speech in South Africa for a long time. Like offal generally, they belong to the cuts that were left over, cheap because they were unwanted, and they were made into a proper dish by the communities they were left to. Trotters are eaten worldwide and the treatments vary enormously. Patitas de cerdo in Puerto Rico is a tomato and chickpea stew. Norwegian syltelabb is salted, cooked and eaten cold before Christmas. The South African version here is a simple braise: onions and tomato first, the trotters sealed into them, then two to three hours at very low heat until the skin yields completely. Pap is the standard partner.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

EasySouth Africa

Recette de Amara · Africook

Cape Malay Pickled Fish

Firm white fish, floured and fried, then layered under a sweet-sour curried onion sauce and left in the fridge for at least a day before it is eaten. It is Cape Malay, it is South African, and in Cape Town it is inseparable from Easter. The Cape Malay community descends from people brought to the Cape from Southeast Asia, largely from the Indonesian archipelago, as slaves and political exiles by the Dutch from the seventeenth century onwards. Their cooking is the origin of much of what is now considered characteristically Cape cuisine, and pickled fish belongs squarely to it, the turmeric, the coriander seed, the bay leaves and the sweet-sour balance are all markers of that lineage. The Easter association is real but the explanations for it vary, and the dish is not exclusively Christian: it is eaten in Muslim Cape Malay households too, which is one of the reasons the "made for Good Friday" account is contested. Its practical origin is simpler. Vinegar and sugar preserve cooked fish for weeks without refrigeration, which mattered a great deal in the early colonial Cape. It genuinely improves with time. A day in the fridge is the minimum; two or three is better, and it holds for several weeks. The source's nutritional claims have not been carried across.

50 minMediumSouth Africa

Recette de Amara · Africook