Recettes

Cape Malay Yellow Rice

Rice cooked with turmeric, cinnamon, raisins and sugar into a sweet golden side dish. It is South African, from the Cape Malay tradition, and it is served alongside savoury curries and meat. Sweet rice as a savoury accompaniment is the thing to understand. Cape Malay yellow rice contains sugar, raisins and cinnamon, and it goes with curry, bobotie and roast meat, the sweetness is deliberately set against savoury and spiced food rather than served as a dessert. That contrast runs right through Cape Malay cooking and it is the same instinct behind bobotie's fruit chutney and the apricot jam in pickled fish. The community it comes from was formed by people brought to the Cape from Southeast Asia as slaves and political exiles by the Dutch from the seventeenth century onwards, and the dish is one of many that carries that history directly. Related yellow rices exist across the world, nasi kuning in Indonesia, kaha buth in Sri Lanka, and the family resemblance is not coincidental. Turmeric is what colours it. Saffron is used in more expensive versions and annatto elsewhere. **A significant problem with this page.** Its ingredient list merges two separate recipes, a yellow rice and a marinated roast chicken, into one list, and its method covers both. Only the rice belongs here.

50 minEasySouth Africa

Recette de AnthonyJ · Africook

No Corn Starch Rice Cakes (Ablo)

Ablo, also written abolo, is a steamed rice cake with a light, springy crumb, eaten across the coastal stretch of West Africa where Togo, Benin, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire meet. It is white, faintly sweet, faintly sour, and built to be torn and dipped. Its texture is the result of fermentation rather than of any raising agent alone. Rice is soaked, ground and left to rise, and the sourness that develops in that time is the difference between an ablo and a plain steamed dumpling. In Benin the cakes are steamed wrapped in banana leaf bundles, which leaves a green, faintly grassy note that a metal mould cannot give. Ablo occupies the position that bread occupies elsewhere: it is the mild thing on the plate that the sauce is for. It is eaten with thick stews and grilled fish, and it belongs equally to a party table and a home meal. In a food culture where most starches are pounded or stirred, a steamed and leavened cake is a distinct approach, and one that Togolese, Beninese, Ghanaian and Ivorian cooks share across their borders.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

2 hr 10 minMediumBenin

Recette de AnthonyJ · Africook

Waakye

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.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 15 minEasyGhana

Recette de Cuisine228 · 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