Recettes

Rice Balls (Omo Tuo)

Omo tuo is the Ghanaian rice ball, made by cooking soft rice well past the point of doneness and then mashing it until the grains give up their structure and bind into a smooth dough that can be shaped by hand. It is Sunday food. Omo tuo is strongly associated with Sunday lunch in Ghanaian households and with the soups that accompany it, principally nkatenkwan, the peanut soup, and abenkwan, the palm nut soup. It is eaten by pinching off a piece of the ball and using it to scoop, and it is not eaten with cutlery. The same preparation exists in northern Nigeria and Niger as tuwo shinkafa, where it belongs to the Hausa tuwo family of grain swallows and is eaten with an entirely different set of soups: miyan kuka, miyan taushe, miyan wake. The technique is effectively identical and the two are best understood as one method with two national traditions around it. What separates them is what goes beside them on the plate, and in Ghana that means groundnut and palm nut soup rather than baobab leaf and pumpkin.

45 minEasyGhana

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Dominican Spaghetti

Dominican spaghetti is a Caribbean dish, not an African one, and the distinction matters on a platform documenting African food. It belongs to the Dominican Republic, where Italian migrants arriving in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought pasta into a kitchen that already had its own strong idea of what a tomato sauce should be. What resulted is recognisably Dominican rather than Italian. The base is sofrito, the sautéed onion, pepper, garlic and coriander mixture that underpins cooking across the Spanish speaking Caribbean, and the sauce carries green olives, capers and raisins alongside beef, pork or shredded chicken. That combination of briny, sweet and savoury in one sauce is a Hispanic Caribbean signature with roots reaching back through Spain to the Moorish kitchens of North Africa. That last connection is the only thread linking this dish to the continent, and it is a long and indirect one. Dominican spaghetti is presented here as what it is, a Caribbean pasta dish rather than an African one, and it sits in the Worldwide Recipes collection for that reason.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasyDominican Republic

Recette de Debby · Africook

Beetroot Rice

Beetroot rice is rice cooked with beetroot, which turns it a deep purple, and it is worth saying plainly that the source for this recipe is describing an Indian dish. Beetroot pulao is a well established South Indian preparation, and the source's own text discusses pulao, sona masuri rice and serving with raita, none of which are Nigerian references. That does not make the dish uninteresting, and there is a real Nigerian angle to it. Rice is the most eaten starch in urban Nigeria and cooked rice with stew is among the most common household meals in the country, so a coloured rice variation slots into an existing habit easily. Nigerian cooks have adopted vegetable rice dishes from a range of sources and made them ordinary, in the same way that spaghetti and coleslaw have become normal parts of the national table. What can be said with confidence is that this is a contemporary dish rather than an inherited one, and that its documented lineage runs to India rather than to Africa. The country field is left empty for that reason. Beetroot itself is not an African crop and is not part of any traditional African preparation on the continent. The recipe is included as what it is, with the attribution left open for a contributor to settle.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

40 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Maryam · Africook

Ivorian Jollof Rice

Ivorian jollof is the Francophone entry in a dish the Anglophone countries argue about most loudly. It carries the same tomato base as its neighbours and seasons it with curry powder, thyme, ginger, garlic and scotch bonnet, and it commonly cooks the cabbage and carrots in the pot with the rice rather than serving them separately. Côte d'Ivoire calls it jollof, and the wider Francophone West African name for the family is riz gras, meaning fat rice. That name describes the method accurately: rice cooked in an oil rich tomato broth until it takes all of it up. In Côte d'Ivoire the dish belongs to the same occasions it does everywhere else in the region, which is to say weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies and any gathering that expects to feed a crowd from one pot. The origin is not seriously disputed by anyone who looks into it. Jollof descends from the rice tradition of the Senegambian coast, associated with the Jolof polity that held parts of present day Senegal and the Gambia between roughly 1350 and 1549, in a region documented as the Rice Coast for the grains grown along the Senegal River. One account traces its spread through the Djula traders of the Mali empire. Neither Nigeria nor Ghana invented it, which neither country lets get in the way of the argument.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hrMediumCôte d'Ivoire

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook