Recettes

Butternut Soup

Butternut soup is butternut squash cooked down and blended smooth, thick, sweet, deep orange, and eaten across a wide stretch of Africa as well as far beyond it. Its African presence is genuine and spread out. It appears in North African cooking and in southern Africa, particularly in Mozambique and Namibia, and it is a fixture of South African winter cooking. That distribution reflects the crop rather than a single tradition: butternut grows well across a range of African climates and is cheap and widely available. What varies is the seasoning, and it splits roughly along regional lines. Northern versions lean towards cumin, coriander and warm spice. Southern African versions more often use curry powder, ginger and a little sugar, and finish with cream. Chilli appears in both. The squash does most of the work. Roasting rather than boiling it concentrates the sugars and deepens the flavour considerably, at the cost of extra time. **Country left blank deliberately**, the dish is documented across several African cuisines and attributing it to one would be a guess.

EasySouth Africa

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Chorba (Shorba)

Chorba is the Tunisian Ramadan soup: lamb or beef in a stewed tomato base with ras el hanout, thickened with frik and finished with coriander and mint. It is eaten year round but it is a fixture on every Tunisian table through Ramadan. Its range is wider than Tunisia. Chorba, also written shorba, is made across the whole area once controlled by the Ottoman Empire, from Morocco through to Bulgaria and Croatia, and every one of those countries has its own version under a closely related name. Fish versions are popular on the Tunisian coast. Frik is what makes this one specific. Also written freekeh, it is green durum wheat harvested young and roasted, which gives it a distinctly smoky, nutty flavour that no other grain has, and it thickens the soup as it cooks. The source's prose describes bulgur wheat, which is a different product: bulgur is mature wheat, parboiled and cracked, without the smokiness. The ingredient list correctly specifies frik. Ras el hanout, preserved lemon and fresh coriander carry the rest, and the soup freezes well, which the contributor notes is worth planning for.

1 hr 35 minEasyTunisia

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Mozambique Matapa Recipe

Matapa is Mozambique's cassava leaf dish, and it is where the country's two food geographies meet. Cassava leaves and groundnuts belong to the interior; coconut milk and dried shrimp belong to the Indian Ocean coast. Matapa puts all four in one pot, and the result tastes like nowhere else on the continent. It is most common in the south of the country, where the ingredients are close at hand and inexpensive, and it is everyday food rather than occasion food. Mozambican households eat it with rice or bread. The dish is also known as matata in some accounts, and the naming shifts across regions in the way that dishes carried by many communities usually do. The cassava leaves are what make it. They are finely chopped and cooked long enough to lose their fibre and their raw edge, and the groundnuts thicken the coconut milk around them into something dense and savoury. Cooks substitute spinach, kale, collard greens or pumpkin leaves where cassava leaves are hard to come by, and every Mozambican will tell you the substitution is not the same dish.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hrMediumMozambique

Recette de Debby · Africook

Edo Black Soup

Edo black soup takes its name from its colour, and the colour comes entirely from its leaves. Bitter leaf, scent leaf and uziza are ground together until they release a dark green so deep it reads as black in the bowl, and that grinding is the whole architecture of the dish: the leaves are the thickener, the flavour and the appearance at once. It belongs to Edo State in southern Nigeria and is particularly associated with the Esan people. Within Nigeria's enormous catalogue of soups, black soup is distinguished by how little palm oil it uses. Most southern Nigerian soups are built on a generous quantity of it; this one uses enough to round the leaves and no more, which leaves the bitterness and the aromatic sharpness of the greens in the foreground rather than behind a screen of oil. The three leaves are argued about. Some Edo cooks hold that two are sufficient, others that all three are necessary for balance, and the ratio between them is a matter of household preference. Black soup is eaten with fufu or pounded yam, and the pairing of a dense swallow against a soup this concentrated is the point of both.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

40 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Taiwo Oladapo · Africook