Recettes

Dawa

Dawa means medicine in Swahili, and the name is a joke that stuck. The drink is lime muddled with sugar, poured over ice with vodka and finished with honey on a stirring stick, and Kenyans order it as their dawa in the way people elsewhere claim a drink is medicinal. Its origin is unusually well documented for a cocktail. It was created at the Carnivore restaurant in the Langata suburb of Nairobi, adapted from the Brazilian caipirinha after bartenders found the cane spirit cachaça gave them headaches and switched to vodka. One regular, who happened to be the restaurant's landlord, began asking for another dose of his dawa, and the name spread with the drink. It is now found across Kenya. The honey stick is the detail that makes it. A wooden stirrer is dipped in honey and left in the glass, so the drinker sweetens the drink themselves, controlling it rather than receiving it pre sweetened. There is also a non alcoholic version made as a hot tea with ginger, lemon, honey, cloves and cinnamon, drunk for sore throats and colds, which is dawa in the more literal sense and is what many Kenyan households mean by the word.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

5 minEasyKenya

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Pineapple, Turmeric and Ginger Juice

This is a cold pressed juice of pineapple, fresh turmeric root and fresh ginger root, and the source names no country for it. All three ingredients are grown and widely used across West and East Africa, and ginger and turmeric in particular are staples of Ghanaian and Nigerian kitchens, but the drink as written is not attached to a documented tradition. What it does have is a clear method: everything goes through a slow juicer rather than a blender. That distinction matters. A slow, or masticating, juicer crushes and presses, separating the juice from the fibre and generating very little heat, which keeps the colour bright and the flavour clean. A high speed blender leaves the pulp in and produces a thick smoothie instead. Turmeric and ginger are both rhizomes, closely related, and both stain heavily. Fresh turmeric will colour a plastic juicer, a chopping board and your hands a vivid yellow that takes days to fade. The juice keeps a week or two refrigerated in airtight glass bottles, which is longer than most fresh juices manage, and the ginger is doing much of that work. Because no country is claimed in the source, none is claimed here.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

20 minEasy

Recette de Rashidatu Alhassan · Africook

Sahlab (Warm Milk Pudding Drink)

Sahlab is warm thickened milk, scented and topped with cinnamon, nuts and coconut. It is drunk across Egypt, the Levant and Turkey in winter, in much the same way hot chocolate is drunk elsewhere. Its name comes from an ingredient this recipe does not contain, and that needs saying plainly. True sahlab is thickened with salep, flour ground from the dried tubers of wild orchids, which gives a distinctive stretchy, slightly chewy texture that nothing else reproduces. Harvesting it requires digging up wild orchids, and the pressure on those populations has been severe enough that Turkey now bans the export of salep outright. Cornflour, which this recipe uses, is the standard modern substitute, and it is what almost all commercial and home versions now use. That makes this a good drink under a name that historically meant something else, which is worth knowing rather than papering over. The one instruction that matters is not to leave the pan. Milk thickened with cornflour catches on the base very readily and scorched milk taints the whole batch. The source repeats a claim that the Romans used orchid drinks as an aphrodisiac. That is recorded as folklore rather than fact.

25 minEasy

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Jebena (Sudanese Spiced Coffee)

Green coffee beans roasted, ground with spices and brewed in a clay pot, then poured through a filter of palm fibre. It is Sudanese, and it is a preparation rather than simply a drink. **This page had no recipe card in the source.** The ingredients and method below are reconstructed from its article, and that is flagged. The context is worth stating. Coffee is East African in origin, Ethiopia is where *Coffea arabica* comes from, and Sudan and Kenya are among the places where it was first used. That makes Sudanese coffee culture not an import but part of the plant's home ground, and the source is right to be proud of it. What distinguishes jebena is that the whole process happens at the point of serving. Beans are roasted fresh in a pan, ground by hand, traditionally in a mortar, with ginger, cardamom and sometimes cloves or cinnamon, and brewed in the clay jebena pot the drink is named after. It is then poured through a filter of palm fibre stuffed in the spout. The source contradicts itself in a single sentence, saying the coffee is brewed very sweet and then that it is served black with no sugar. Both practices exist; the sentence as written cannot be true.

30 minMediumSudan

Recette de Nympha · Africook