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Recettes
Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.
Shiro wat is ground chickpea stew, and it is among the most eaten dishes in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Onion, garlic, tomato and berbere are cooked down in oil, chickpea flour is whisked in, and the result thickens to something between a thick gravy and a puree, smooth enough to spread and eaten with injera.
Its position has a great deal to do with the religious calendar. Ethiopian Orthodox practice includes a very large number of fasting days, on which no meat, eggs or dairy are eaten, and shiro contains none of them. It is standard on Wednesdays and Fridays, through the eight weeks of Tsom, the Great Lent, and it is eaten during Ramadan by Ethiopian and Eritrean Muslims too. That is a dish serving two religions in one country without modification.
It is also cheap and quick, which explains the rest of its reach. Shiro powder, sold ready mixed with the spices already in it, is available across Ethiopia and increasingly abroad, in two kinds: mitten shiro, which is red and carries berbere, and netch shiro, which is white and mild. The dish takes different forms by consistency and name: shiro fessess is runny and served over injera with chillies, shiro tegamino is thick and cooked in an earthenware pot until it bubbles and caramelises at the base, and shiro fit fit shreds injera through it for breakfast.
Moi moi is steamed bean pudding, and it is among the small group of Nigerian dishes that turn up everywhere: at breakfast, at parties, at weddings, in lunchboxes, beside jollof rice, and on its own. Black eyed peas or brown beans are soaked, peeled, blended with pepper and onion, seasoned, and steamed until they set.
The peeling is what most people underestimate. The bean skins have to come off before blending, because they are what stands between a smooth moi moi and a gritty one, and the quality of the blend decides the texture of the finished dish more than any other single factor. Nigerian markets have heavy duty commercial mills for exactly this reason, and home blenders often cannot manage it.
What it is steamed in changes the result and the name. Uma leaves, from Thaumatococcus daniellii, give the best flavour and cook fastest; banana leaves are the common alternative; aluminium foil and heatproof containers are the modern route. Nutmeg is the ingredient people leave out and then wonder why their moi moi does not taste like the one at the party. Egg, corned beef or bone marrow goes into the middle, and moi moi appears as a side to jollof and fried rice, as breakfast with pap or bread, and as a meal in itself.
Ndambé is a Senegalese black eyed pea stew, and its most recognisable form is not a bowl at all. It is loaded into a split baguette and eaten as a sandwich from a roadside stand, which is what most Senegalese picture when the word comes up.
The baguette is a colonial inheritance that Senegal has thoroughly made its own. French bread arrived with colonial administration and is now baked and eaten across the country in quantities that have nothing to do with France, and the ndambé sandwich is one of the clearest examples of what happened to it: a West African bean stew, spiced with chilli and thickened with tomato, packed into a European loaf and sold for very little money.
It is breakfast and dinner food rather than lunch, and Senegalese describe it as winter food, which in Senegal means the cooler months rather than anything a European would call winter. Sweet potato goes in in some households, and meat, usually beef or lamb, in others, though the stew is entirely good without either. Beyond the sandwich it is served with rice, couscous or on its own.
Waakye is rice and beans cooked together with dried millet or sorghum stalk leaves, which leach a deep reddish brown into the grain and give the dish both its colour and its name. It is Ghana's most loved street breakfast, and in Accra and Kumasi the waakye seller is a neighbourhood institution whose location is known, whose quality is debated and whose loyalty is genuinely held.
Sellers begin before dawn and often sell out by mid morning. The dish is bought wrapped in leaves and assembled to the customer's specification from a wide spread of accompaniments: shito, the dark Ghanaian pepper and fish sauce, gari, egg, spaghetti known as talia, fried plantain, avocado, salad, stew and fried fish or meat. A full waakye plate is substantial enough to carry someone through a working day, which is precisely what it is for.
The waakye leaf is the ingredient that cannot be substituted. It is the dried leaf sheath of a West African sorghum, called poporo oka in Yoruba and adako in Togo, and it functions as a colourant rather than a flavouring, with the quantity used determining how deep the colour runs. Black eyed beans are traditional and jasmine rice is the Ghanaian preference. The dish is eaten across West Africa under other names, as wanke in Lagos and ayimolou in Togo.