Recettes

Funge

Funge is the Angolan staple, a smooth, elastic cassava porridge that arrives alongside almost everything and asserts nothing on its own. Its neutrality is functional rather than a failure of ambition. A dish with a strong flavour of its own could not do funge's job, which is to carry the flavour of what it is eaten with. It is made from cassava flour and water, and nothing else is required. Cassava is a tropical root crop grown across Angola, and the flour keeps for months, which is part of why the dish has held its place. In Angola it is funge or funji; the same preparation carries different names and different base starches across the continent, and Angolan households recognise the family resemblance without confusing the members. Funge is eaten with the fingers. Small pieces are pulled off, rolled between the fingers, and used to lift stew, fish or greens from a shared bowl. That method makes it a communal dish by construction rather than by sentiment, and eating from the same bowl of funge carries the meaning that shared eating carries everywhere: this is a household, and you are in it.

Angola25 minDebby

Papaya smoothie in a glass, blended with banana, yogurt and chia seeds

Papaya Smoothie for Weight Loss

Papaya, known as pawpaw across most of anglophone West and East Africa, grows in nearly every tropical African country and in a great many household compounds. It is not a market luxury. A pawpaw tree fruits within a year of planting and keeps fruiting, which is why it turns up at the edge of yards from Lagos to Mombasa and why the fruit is understood as something you have rather than something you buy. Ripe pawpaw is eaten fresh and cold, most often at breakfast, cut into halves or wedges with a squeeze of lime. The lime is not decoration; it sharpens a fruit whose sweetness is soft and slightly musky and which can read as flat without acid. That pairing is the reference point this drink is built on. This particular recipe is a contemporary blended drink rather than a dish with a documented lineage. It belongs to the global category of fruit smoothies made for a health purpose, and it uses pawpaw as its base because pawpaw blends to an unusually smooth, thick texture without any thickener at all. The fruit is African by cultivation and by everyday use rather than by origin.

10 minDebby

Igbo Yam Porridge

Yam is not simply a staple crop among the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria. It is the crop, tied to land, status and the agricultural calendar in a way no other food is, and the yam that goes into this porridge carries that weight into an ordinary weekday meal. Yam porridge is the most direct way to eat it. Slices are cooked until they begin to break down and thicken their own liquid, so the dish is both the yam and the sauce it makes. What marks the version out as Igbo rather than as one of the several other Nigerian yam pottages is the seasoning: ogiri, the fermented seasoning made from oil bean or melon seed, and uziza leaves, whose peppery aroma goes in at the very end. Palm oil supplies the colour and the richness, crayfish the savoury base. Ogiri is the ingredient that decides the dish. Its fermented depth is what separates an Igbo yam porridge from a Yoruba or Hausa preparation of the same root, and households that leave it out are making something else. The porridge is eaten at breakfast and as a light lunch, and it belongs to ordinary domestic cooking rather than to any occasion.

Nigeria30 minDebby

Semovita

Semovita is one of Nigeria's swallows: the family of smooth, firm starch preparations that are pinched off by hand, rolled between the fingers and used to lift soup from a bowl. The swallow is not a side dish. In Nigerian eating it is the vehicle and the soup is the flavour, and a meal is understood as the pairing of the two. It is made from semolina, the coarse milling of durum wheat, and it belongs to the wheat based end of the swallow spectrum rather than the cassava, yam or maize end. That places it alongside amala, eba, fufu, pounded yam and starch as one option among several, chosen by household preference and by what the soup is. Semovita is smoother and milder than most of the alternatives, which is a large part of its appeal. Its status is worth stating plainly: Semovita is a brand name that has become the general term for the product, in the way a number of household names have. The dish is Nigerian, industrially produced and comparatively recent, and it earned its place at the table on texture rather than on history. It is eaten with ogbono, okra, efo riro, egusi and every other Nigerian soup.

Nigeria17 minBlessing

Boerewors Stew

Boerewors is South African sausage, and the name is Afrikaans: boer for farmer, wors for sausage. It is coarsely minced beef, sometimes with pork or lamb, seasoned with toasted coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, and it is made in one continuous coil rather than in links. Its identity is protected in law. South African regulation sets out what may be sold as boerewors, including a minimum meat content and a cap on other ingredients, which is an unusual level of legislative attention for a sausage and a fair measure of how seriously the country takes it. That regulation is also why boerewors is genuinely hard to buy outside South Africa and why South Africans abroad end up making their own. The sausage belongs to the braai above all, grilled in its coil over coals. This stew is what happens to it indoors: cut into pieces, browned, and simmered with tomato, garlic and spices into something closer to a weeknight dish. Boerewors is also eaten with pap and a tomato and onion sauce, which is the standard plate across the country. The stew is a newer treatment of an old sausage, and its spread beyond South Africa has come with the diaspora.

South Africa30 minNympha

Miyan kuka, a Northern Nigerian baobab leaf soup, dark green and thick, served with tuwon shinkafa

Miyan Kuka (Baobab Leaves Soup)

Miyan kuka is Hausa soup made from powdered baobab leaves, and it is the one Northern Nigerian dish that people warn you about before they serve it. It is dark green, mucilaginous and thick, and it does not look like anything anyone finds appetising on first sight. Northerners are entirely aware of this and serve it anyway, because the taste is not in dispute even where the appearance is. Kuka is the dried and ground leaf of the baobab, sold as a dark green powder in markets across the north and instantly recognisable to anyone who has shopped there. The powder is whisked into a seasoned stock at the very end of cooking, which is where the soup gets both its body and its drawing texture. It is also called luru. Nigeria's soups map closely onto its peoples, and miyan kuka is the north's entry in that map: Yoruba households have ewedu, Igbo have ofe ugba, Edo have bitter leaf soup, the riverine south has fisherman soup. Miyan kuka is eaten with tuwon shinkafa, tuwon dawa or any swallow, and it is one of the dishes that is genuinely better on the second day, which is a claim its cooks make readily and which holds up.

Nigeria30 minBeatrice

Nigerian pancakes, thin savoury sweet pancakes made with onion and pepper in the batter

Nigerian Pancake (Diet)

The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and slightly crisp at the edges, and it is savoury as often as it is sweet. Onion and ground pepper go into the batter alongside the sugar, which produces something no other pancake tradition attempts: sweet, savoury and faintly hot in the same mouthful. It sits a long way from the thick fluffy pancake of the American breakfast table. There is no raising agent and no attempt at height. The batter is loose, the pan is tilted to spread it thin, and the result has a dense bite and a lacy edge. Nigerians eat it at breakfast with tea, and just as readily as an afternoon snack with a cold drink. What it is served with follows the same double logic as the batter. Honey, sugar, condensed milk, peanut butter and fresh fruit on the sweet side; pap, custard, oats and yogurt drinks such as kunu aya or zobo alongside. It is home food and street food at once, cheap to make from things most Nigerian kitchens already hold, and it belongs to no particular region of the country, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

Amala

Amala is the swallow of the Yoruba southwest, and it is the darkest thing on a Nigerian table. Yam is peeled, cut, dried and milled into a flour called elubo, and the drying turns the white tuber brown. In boiling water that brown becomes near black, which is the colour amala is known by and which surprises people who expect a starch to be pale. Its home is Oyo State, and Ibadan in particular. The pairing of amala with ewedu, the jute leaf soup, is treated in Ibadan as something close to a civic institution, and the same seriousness attaches to it in Lagos, where you will not find a buka without it on the menu. Yoruba speakers make the comparison directly: amala and ewedu stand to an Ibadan person as akpu and ofe onugbu stand to an Igbo one. Three flours make three amala. Elubo isu, from yam, is the standard and gives the dark version. Lafun, from cassava, gives a white amala and is a different dish in practice. Elubo ogede, from unripe plantain, is lighter in colour and lower in starch. The technique is unforgiving in one specific way: the flour must go into water that has been taken off the heat, or it lumps, and lumps in amala are the fastest way to ruin it.

Nigeria20 minBeatrice

Nigerian pounded yam, a smooth elastic white yam swallow served with soup

Easy Ways To Make Nigerian Pounded Yam

Pounded yam is white yam softened and then beaten until it becomes smooth, sticky and elastic, and it sits at the top of the Nigerian swallow hierarchy. Nigerians will argue about most things in their food and generally will not argue about this: iyan is what you serve when the occasion matters. The pounding is the dish. The yam is softened, transferred hot to a mortar and worked with a pestle until the structure breaks down completely and the mass turns stretchy, and there is a technique to it that varies between ethnic groups and is learned rather than described. It is hard physical work, traditionally done by women though not exclusively, and the sound of it carries. It is called iyan by the Yoruba, and the same or a closely related preparation is foutou in Côte d'Ivoire, fufu in Togo and Benin, and yam fufu in Ghana, which makes it one of the most widely made yam products in West Africa. Its texture is what distinguishes it from the rest of the swallow family: smoother than eba, more elastic than amala, and considerably more work than either. Food processors, blenders and hand mixers have made it accessible on a weeknight, and pounded yam flour has made it possible with no yam at all, which purists note without much affecting what happens in most kitchens.

Nigeria30 minBeatrice

Djablani

Djablani is a Malian drink of ginger, lemon and baobab, served cold and sharply flavoured. It belongs to the family of fresh homemade drinks sold in bags and bottles across West Africa, alongside bissap made from hibiscus and dakar made from tamarind, prepared in quantity in households and sold by the roadside. The baobab is what places it. The tree grows across the Sahel and is one of the defining plants of the Malian landscape, distinctive in shape, able to survive extreme heat and poor soil, and long lived on a scale that has made it a landmark in its own right. Its fruit gives a pale tart pulp used in drinks and porridges across the region, and its leaves are dried and ground for soup. Ginger carries the rest. West African ginger drinks are made strong, and the heat in a properly made djablani is genuine rather than suggested, which is what the sugar and the lemon are there to balance. It is served cold, often with mint, and it is refreshment in a climate where that word means something specific. Fresh drinks of this kind are a category of their own in West African hospitality: made at home, given to guests, and sold cheaply on the street.

Mali15 minDeborah

Thiakry, a Senegalese dessert of millet couscous with sweetened yogurt, served cold

Thiakry Couscous

Thiakry is millet couscous stirred into sweetened yogurt and milk, served cold, and it is one of the most widely eaten sweet things in Senegal and the Gambia. It is also written thiakri, chakery, caakiri and degue, and the spelling shifts with the language and the writer while the dish stays the same. Millet is the reason it exists. It is one of the principal grains of Senegal, grown across the drier interior where rice does not do well, and thiakry is among the most common things made from it. The grain is milled to a couscous and steamed, then cooled and folded into the dairy. In Dakar it is sold in every grocery store, which is a fair measure of how ordinary a food it is. It is eaten at breakfast as readily as at the end of a meal, which puts it in the same category as yogurt everywhere: sweet, cold, and not confined to dessert. Raisins, mango, grated coconut and chopped almonds are all standard on top, and vanilla and nutmeg are the usual flavourings. Its close relation ngalakh, made with peanut paste and baobab, is the elaborated festival version of the same base. Thiakry is the everyday one.

Senegal15 minCuisine228

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.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

Ogi, a Nigerian fermented corn porridge served with akara bean cakes

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

Ogi is fermented cereal porridge, sour, smooth and pale, and it is among the first things most Nigerians ever eat. It is called akamu in Igbo and pap in English, and it is made from maize, sorghum or millet steeped in water for up to three days, wet milled, sieved to remove the husks, and then fermented for several more days until it turns distinctly sour. That sourness is the point and it is what separates ogi from any other cereal porridge. It also does real work: fermentation makes the grain more digestible and gives ogi a probiotic character, which is a large part of why it has been the standard weaning food for Nigerian infants for generations and why it is given to people who are unwell or recovering. The same base goes in two directions. Thinned and cooked, it is the porridge eaten at breakfast with akara, moin moin, fried plantain or bread. Cooked much thicker and left to set, it becomes agidi or eko, sliced and eaten with pepper soup or stew. Across the region the names change without the thing changing much: koko in Ghana, uji in Kenya, where it is more often made from millet and sorghum. Three grains are used in Nigeria, and white corn, yellow corn and guinea corn each give a slightly different result.

Nigeria10 minDebby

Fura Da Nono

Fura da nono is millet and milk, and the name says exactly that: fura is the millet ball, nono is the fermented milk. Spiced millet dough is rolled into balls, then mashed into soured milk and drunk from a bowl or a calabash. It is both a meal and a drink and Nigerians do not find that ambiguous. It belongs to the Sahel and to the peoples who move across it. The Fulani, the Hausa and the Zarma-Songhai all make it, and it is eaten across northern Nigeria, Niger and Ghana. Its logic is the logic of cattle keeping: milk that will not keep in the heat is soured deliberately, and millet that grows where little else does is what goes with it. The way it is sold explains its form. Vendors carry the fura balls and the nono separately and combine them to order, mashing the millet into the milk in front of the customer, which lets them sell two products from one stand and keeps the fura from going soggy before it is bought. In a hot climate, a cold, sour, filling drink that costs very little is a serious thing rather than a refreshment, and fura da nono has held its place in northern Nigerian life without needing to modernise.

Nigeria30 minDebby

Kac kac, Somali fried sweets cut into diamonds and served with spiced milk tea

Somali Doughnuts (Kac Kac)

Kac kac, also written ka'ka, are Somali fried sweets: crisp on the outside, soft within, and cut into diamonds or squares rather than shaped into rings. They are closer to a biscuit than to a raised doughnut, because they use baking powder rather than yeast and the dough is rolled and cut rather than proved. Their setting is tea. Kac kac go with shaah caddeeys, the spiced milk tea that anchors Somali hospitality, and the pairing is fixed enough that one implies the other. They are sold in the maqaayo Soomaali, the traditional restaurants of Mogadishu and other Somali cities, where they are made in large batches in the morning and generally sold out well before the day is over. They also belong to Ramadan. A dense, sweet, portable fried thing that keeps for days is exactly what is wanted for iftar, and kac kac appear on Somali tables through the month in quantity. The marking on the surface, a light score with a knife before frying, is not decoration alone: it helps them cook through evenly and gives the piece its characteristic look. Somali communities across the diaspora have carried them intact, and they are among the first things a Somali household abroad will make for visitors.

Somalia30 minCuisine228

Klako, West African fritters of mashed ripe plantain seasoned with ginger and pepper, fried golden

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Klako, also written krakro, is a West African fritter made from mashed ripe plantain, and it is the plantain rather than the banana that matters. Ripe plantain has the sweetness and the starch to hold a fritter together; ordinary banana turns to liquid. The recipe here is savoury, seasoned with ginger, garlic, paprika and cayenne, which is the version most commonly eaten across Côte d'Ivoire, Togo and Ghana. That savoury treatment is worth stating clearly, because the sweet version is what most people expect from anything called a banana fritter. Both exist. Sweet versions with sugar, egg and milk are made across the region and across the Caribbean, and the two have travelled together, which is no accident: the same cooking crossed the Atlantic with enslaved West Africans, and Caribbean banana fritters are a direct relation rather than a coincidence. Plantain is abundant across the humid West African belt and very little of it is wasted. Fritters are one of several answers to fruit that has ripened past the point of frying in slices, alongside kelewele, the spiced fried plantain cubes of Ghana, and the many plantain and flour combinations across the region. They are made at home, sold at roadside stands, and eaten hot with the fingers, which is when they are at their best.

Côte d'Ivoire30 minCuisine228

Alkubus

Alkubus is a Hausa steamed wheat bread from Northern Nigeria, plain by design and made to be eaten with something else. It is soft, faintly sour from the yeast, and it holds its shape well enough to be cut into rounds or wedges. Its role on the plate is the role bread plays across the north: the thing that carries the soup. Alkubus is eaten most often with miyan taushe, the pumpkin and groundnut soup, and it also goes with agushi soup, vegetable soup, cabbage stew or a plain tomato sauce. That pairing with miyan taushe is the one Northern Nigerians name first. There are two ways to make it and they produce different things. Baked in a greased pan and topped with carrot and onion, it is a loaf to be cut and eaten in slices. Portioned into wrappers and steamed over boiling water, it comes out softer and denser, closer to a dumpling, and that is the method the recipe here follows. Steaming rather than baking runs through a great deal of Hausa cooking, from dambu to danwake to masa, and alkubus belongs to that family more than it does to any oven tradition.

Nigeria25 minNympha

Mbakbaka, a Libyan one pot pasta stew with lamb, potatoes and North African spices

Mbakbaka (Libyan Pasta Stew)

Mbakbaka, also written imbakbaka, is Libya's one pot pasta stew and it is a direct product of Italian colonisation. Italy occupied Libya from 1911 to 1943, pasta arrived with the occupation, and Libyan cooks absorbed it into a North African spice framework rather than adopting Italian technique alongside it. The result is a pasta dish that no Italian would recognise. Turmeric, ginger, curry powder, chilli and mixed spices go into a tomato base with lamb or beef, and the pasta cooks directly in that liquid rather than being cooked separately and sauced afterwards. Potatoes go in too. Cooking the pasta in the sauce is the defining decision: the starch thickens the liquid and the pasta absorbs the spice, which is what makes it a stew rather than pasta with sauce on it. Macaroni elbows are the traditional shape, and ditalini, gemelli and other small pastas all suit it for the same reason: the tubes and twists hold the sauce. Harissa is a common addition for heat. The comparison people reach for is minestrone, which captures the one pot logic and misses the spicing entirely. It is winter food and family food, and it is eaten across Libya and among the Libyan diaspora.

Libya28 minBlessing

Okro Soup

Okro soup is among the quickest Nigerian soups to make and among the most eaten. Okra is chopped, cooked briefly in a stock built on assorted meat, dried fish and crayfish, finished with palm oil, and taken off the heat while it is still green. The whole thing takes minutes once the vegetables are cut, which is the trade off: most of the work is chopping. Okra is native to Africa, with its origin generally placed in the Ethiopian highlands, and it has spread from there across the continent and well beyond it. The draw it produces, the viscous quality that thickens the soup, is the entire point in West African cooking and the thing that people elsewhere often try to eliminate. Here it is what makes the soup work with a swallow: it slides. The names change across Nigeria. Ila asepo among the Yoruba, okwuru among the Igbo, miyan kubewa in Hausa, otong among the Efik, and okro generally. Potash, called kaun, is traditional for increasing the draw and is now optional and somewhat contested, with many cooks leaving it out entirely. Used at all it must be used sparingly, since too much kills the elasticity it is meant to increase. It is eaten with eba, fufu, semo, amala or pounded yam.

Nigeria25 minFoodChef

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.

Dominican Republic30 minDebby

Nigerian Jollof Spaghetti

Jollof spaghetti applies the jollof method to pasta, and it is one of the most widely made contemporary dishes in Nigerian home kitchens. The pepper base is built exactly as it would be for rice, with blended tomato, tatashe and scotch bonnet reduced in oil with onion, ginger and garlic, and the spaghetti is finished in it so the strands take on the colour and the flavour rather than merely wearing it. Spaghetti arrived in Nigeria through mid twentieth century trade and has become one of the country's most eaten starches, particularly in urban households where it is quick and cheap. What Nigerians did with it is characteristic: rather than adopting Italian technique, they applied their own most important cooking method to it. The same has happened with jollof couscous, jollof penne and jollof noodles. It is weekday food rather than occasion food. Where jollof rice is the centrepiece of a party, jollof spaghetti is what gets made on a Tuesday, often with sausage or leftover chicken and whatever vegetables are in the house. It is served with eggs, fried plantain or chicken, and its status as a real Nigerian dish rather than a novelty is no longer in question among the people who eat it.

Nigeria30 minSobecooks

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.

Kenya5 minBlessing

Jollof Couscous

Jollof couscous applies the jollof method to North African couscous, and it sits at the meeting point of two quite separate West and North African traditions. The tomato and pepper base is built as it would be for jollof rice; the grain is steamed couscous rather than long grain rice. Couscous itself is North African, rolled from semolina and traditionally steamed several times in a couscoussier until it is light and separate rather than gummy. In Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia it is served with a spiced vegetable stew and meat, which is a different proposition entirely from what happens here. Its texture is often compared to attiéké, the fermented cassava of Côte d'Ivoire, though the two share only appearance. Jollof itself is contested territory between Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and beyond, and applying it to couscous is a modern move rather than an inherited one. The source attributes this version to Senegal, which is where the jollof tradition originates in the thieboudienne of the Wolof people, though the framing in the original text is Nigerian. It is quick food, twenty minutes from start to finish, and it is honest about being an adaptation.

Senegal30 minCuisine228

Afang Soup

Afang soup belongs to the Efik and Ibibio people of Cross River and Akwa Ibom in southeastern Nigeria, and it is built on two vegetables that do quite different jobs. Afang, okazi to the Igbo, and known botanically as Gnetum africanum, is a tough, wiry forest leaf with a faintly bitter edge. It is sliced extremely finely, almost shredded, because whole it would be unpleasant to eat. Waterleaf is the counterweight: soft, quick to wilt, and full of moisture, which is what gives the soup its body without much added liquid. The pairing is the point, and it is what separates afang from edikang ikong, the other great vegetable soup of the same region. Edikang ikong uses waterleaf and ugu, the pumpkin leaf, and reads as sweeter and greener. Afang uses waterleaf and okazi, and carries that characteristic bitterness. People from the region can tell them apart instantly, and the leaf is the whole distinction. Around the vegetables sits an assortment that scales with the household budget, beef, shaki, dried and fresh fish, periwinkle, crayfish, palm oil, pepper. It is a soup that has long been read as a marker of a generous table, and it is served with any of the swallows.

Nigeria10 minJennifer

Sonhos de Banana

Sonhos de banana means banana dreams in Portuguese, and they are small fried fritters from São Tomé and Príncipe, the island nation off the coast of Central Africa. Mashed banana is worked into a batter with flour, egg, milk and sugar, dropped into hot oil and dusted with cinnamon sugar while still warm. The Portuguese connection runs through everything about them. São Tomé and Príncipe was a Portuguese colony from the late fifteenth century until 1975, and sonhos are a Portuguese sweet in their own right, a fried dough eaten particularly at Christmas. What the islands did was put banana into them, which is what the archipelago grows, and the result is closer to a beignet than to a doughnut. The same sweet, under the same name, is eaten in Brazil, which shares the Portuguese colonial inheritance from the other side of the Atlantic. That triangle of Portugal, São Tomé and Brazil is visible in a great deal of the islands' food, and sonhos de banana is one of the clearest examples. They are eaten as a dessert or simply as something sweet in the afternoon, and they are at their best within minutes of leaving the pan.

São Tomé and Príncipe30 minNympha

Peppermint Crisp Tart

Peppermint crisp tart is a South African fridge tart, which is a category of dessert the country has more or less to itself: no baking, assembled in layers, and set in the refrigerator rather than an oven. This one takes about fifteen minutes to build and then several hours of waiting, which is the hardest part. It is built from four things, three of which are specific products. Whipped cream is folded together with caramelised condensed milk, grated Peppermint Crisp chocolate is stirred through, and the mixture is layered between Tennis biscuits, a coconut biscuit that softens into an almost cake-like layer as it sits. The biscuits are what make it a tart rather than a mousse. That dependence on particular brands makes it awkward to reproduce outside southern Africa, and South Africans abroad tend to have it carried out to them. The usual substitutions are a peppermint Aero bar for the Peppermint Crisp and a plain coconut biscuit for the Tennis. It appears at braais, birthdays and family gatherings, and it belongs firmly to the same national repertoire as malva pudding and koeksisters.

South Africa15 minAmara

Chakalaka Boerewors

Chakalaka boerewors puts two South African staples together: boerewors, the coiled farmer's sausage of beef and spice that is the centre of any braai, and chakalaka, the spiced vegetable relish of onion, pepper, carrot, chilli and beans that goes alongside almost everything. Boerewors is protected by law in South Africa. Regulations set a minimum meat content and cap the amount of cereal and fat, and coriander is the defining spice, with nutmeg, cloves and allspice alongside it. It is always sold and cooked as a continuous coil rather than in links, and cutting it into pieces before cooking, as this recipe does, is a departure from how it is usually treated. Chakalaka's origins are generally placed in the townships of Johannesburg, where it is said to have been made by mineworkers from what was available, and it has since become a national side dish served hot or cold. The two together, cooked in one pan over a fire, is home cooking rather than a documented traditional dish, and the source describes it in the first person as something the contributor made. It is included as given.

South Africa25 minLisias Johanna

Homemade Pilau Masala

Pilau masala is the spice blend behind pilau, the spiced rice of the East African coast, and it is a short list of whole spices rather than a long one. Cumin, black peppercorns, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon are roasted briefly and ground, and that is the whole thing. The blend belongs to the Swahili coast, where centuries of Indian Ocean trade brought spices from South and Southeast Asia into the cooking of Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar. Pilau itself is a relative of the pilaf and pulao found from Persia to India, adapted along the coast into something distinctly East African, and the masala is the point at which that trade history is most visible. Whether to buy it or make it is the practical question. Pre-ground blends are widely sold and perfectly usable, but ground spices lose their volatile oils quickly, and the difference between a jar that has sat on a shelf for a year and spices roasted and ground the same day is not subtle. It requires no grinder: a mortar and pestle does the job, and the roasting step is what makes it worth doing at all, since brief heat opens up the aromatics before they are broken down.

Kenya30 minDebby

African salad, the Igbo dish of shredded cassava abacha with fermented ugba and palm oil

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

African salad is the Igbo dish of abacha and ugba, and it is a salad only in the loosest sense. Abacha is cassava that has been cooked, shredded on a special grater, soaked overnight, rinsed and dried in the sun. Ugba is fermented oil bean seed, cooked for hours, sliced, rinsed and left to ferment. Neither is cooked when the dish is assembled. That is the striking thing about it: almost the entire preparation happens off the stove. Palm oil is turned into a thick yellow paste by working it with potash solution, and everything else is folded into that paste in sequence. The order matters, and Igbo cooks are firm about it, because the components will not distribute evenly if they all go in together. It belongs to ceremony. At an Igbo wedding, abacha is reserved for the important guests, and it is served with chilled palm wine, which is the pairing anyone from the region will name. Despite being filling enough to be a meal, it is treated as a snack rather than a main course. It can be served cold or warmed briefly, and the choice between the two is a matter of household preference rather than correctness.

Nigeria30 minFoodChef

Fish Seasoning

This is a dry spice rub for fish, and it belongs to no particular cuisine. Paprika, thyme, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, black pepper and cayenne is a broadly Western seasoning profile, and the source claims no country for it. That is worth stating plainly on a platform documenting African food, because Africa has a great many specific fish seasonings that this is not. Nigerian fish is seasoned with blended pepper, ginger and stock cubes. Senegalese fish carries rof, a stuffing of parsley, garlic and chilli pushed into slashes in the flesh. Moroccan fish is marinated in chermoula, built on coriander, cumin, paprika and preserved lemon. Any of those would be the regional answer to the question this recipe is asking. What is here is a competent all purpose blend, useful for grilling, baking or pan frying, and it keeps for months in a sealed jar. It is filed under Worldwide Recipes rather than presented as African, since inventing a heritage for a paprika and oregano rub would be exactly the kind of claim this archive should not make.

10 minDebby

Millet Porridge

Millet porridge is one of the oldest breakfasts on the continent. Millet is an ancient cereal grain eaten across Africa and Asia for thousands of years, and pearl millet in particular is a staple across the Sahel, where it grows in conditions that defeat most other grains. Porridges made from it appear under many names. Fura in northern Nigeria and Niger is millet worked into balls and mixed with fermented milk. Ogi and koko are made from fermented millet or maize across West Africa. Uji in East Africa is often millet based. This particular recipe is a plainer, contemporary preparation, rinsed and simmered rather than fermented, and its flavour ideas run to cinnamon apple and pumpkin spice, which places it in a Western health food register rather than a West African one. The grain itself does the work. Millet has a mild, faintly sweet and nutty flavour, cooks to a texture close to cream of wheat, and turns genuinely creamy when blended after cooking. It carries more protein and fibre than most grains and no gluten at all, which is why it has found a second audience outside the regions that have always eaten it. No country is claimed here, because the porridge as written belongs to none in particular.

25 minDebby

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.

20 minRashidatu Alhassan

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