Recettes

Ngalakh

Ngalakh is Senegal's Easter dish, and the sentence needs the qualification that in Senegal Easter is not primarily about chocolate or eggs. It is about ngalakh: a thick millet porridge bound with peanut paste and baobab fruit, made in quantity and sent out of the house. That last part is the dish. Ngalakh is prepared by Christian households and distributed to neighbours, friends and colleagues, most of whom are Muslim, in a country where the two communities live closely and intermarry. It is also served at Korité, marking the end of Ramadan, moving in the other direction. A dessert that exists to be given away across a religious line is doing something more than feeding people, and Senegalese describe it directly as an expression of teranga, the national value of hospitality and sharing. Its base is thiakry, the medium grain millet semolina, as distinct from thiéré, which is finer. The peanut paste supplies richness and the bouye, the powdered pulp of the baobab fruit, supplies a tart acidity that cuts it. That pairing of heavy and sharp is what makes ngalakh work where a sweet porridge alone would not. It is eaten cold, from large bowls, dusted with sugar.

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MediumSenegal

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Agidi or Eko

Agidi, called eko in Yoruba, is corn starch cooked to a firm set and left to cool into a smooth, sliceable block. It is faintly sour, cool to eat, and holds its shape on a plate, which makes it unusual among Nigerian starches, most of which are served hot and soft. It is one of the few Nigerian dishes that genuinely crosses every line in the country. North to south, across tribes, classes and religions, agidi turns up on the same table, which is a rarer thing in Nigerian food than the country's shared reputation for hospitality might suggest. It is eaten at breakfast with akara, the fried bean cake, and it is served alongside pepper soup, stew, banga, ogbono and egusi at other hours. It comes from the same process that produces ogi, the fermented corn pap, taken further. Where ogi is drunk, agidi is set. It is traditionally poured into uma or banana leaves, which give it its characteristic tapered shape and a faint green scent, and the leaves are the reason it appears in markets as a wrapped parcel rather than a slab. It is also commonly the first solid food given to Nigerian babies.

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EasyNigeria

Recette de Blessing · Africook

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Awara is Northern Nigerian soy bean cake, and it is one of the clearest examples of an introduced crop becoming a genuinely local food. Soy beans are not indigenous to West Africa. Awara, as the Hausa make and eat it, is not found anywhere the crop came from. What separates awara from tofu is the frying. The process to the curd stage is the same: beans are soaked, ground, strained to a milk, heated, and set with an acid or a mineral coagulant, then pressed. Where East Asian tofu is usually finished at the press, awara is cut, seasoned and fried until the outside is golden and firm. That frying step is the dish, and it produces something with a texture and a flavour of its own. It is street food and snack food, sold ready made across the north because the process at home is long. Awara is served hot with ground pepper and oil, and increasingly with sliced fresh pepper, cabbage and cucumber alongside. It is eaten with pap or kunu at breakfast, and at any hour after that. It is also the north's most practical answer for anyone eating no meat, which is a role it has held far longer than the word vegetarian has been in common use in Nigeria.

1 hr 30 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

Egusi Soup

Egusi soup is eaten across every region of Nigeria, every ethnic group and every economic class, which is a claim very few dishes anywhere can support. Its name changes with the language and the dish does not: miyan gushi in Hausa, ofe egusi in Igbo, efo elegusi in Yoruba. Its defining ingredient is ground egusi, the dried seed of a gourd related to the watermelon, milled to a meal that thickens and enriches the soup around it. The seeds are ground dry, without water, until the powder turns to a paste under the blade. Nothing else produces the particular nutty, faintly bitter depth that egusi gives, which is why the soup is named for the seed rather than for the meat or the greens that also go into it. There is no single method. The caking approach lets the ground seed set into soft curds in the stock; the frying approach starts the egusi in palm oil; the moulding approach forms it into balls that are eaten like meat. Ijebu cooks in Ogun State make it with no vegetables at all. Every one of these is egusi soup, and Nigerians will argue for their own without seriously disputing anyone else's. It is eaten with pounded yam, fufu, eba, amala or any swallow at hand.

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50 minMediumNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · Africook