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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken Kebabs

Kebab is a Middle Eastern preparation, and the source says so directly. Cut or ground meat cooked on a skewer over open flame is one of the oldest cooking methods there is, and the word and the technique both come from that region before spreading almost everywhere. Mutton and lamb are the traditional meats. Regional versions use beef, goat, chicken or fish, and pork rarely, given religious constraints across much of the region where kebab originates. Not every kebab involves a skewer either: tas kebab is baked in a skillet or served as a stew, which shows how loosely the word travels. Africa has a great deal of skewered grilled meat of its own, and this recipe is not it. Nigerian suya is coated in yaji, a peanut based spice blend. Sudanese agashe works the same way. Moroccan brochettes are marinated in cumin and paprika. Egyptian kofta is ground and shaped rather than cubed. This version is marinated in soy sauce, olive oil, oregano, garlic and lemon, which is a Mediterranean and Levantine profile, so it sits in the Worldwide Recipes collection rather than being presented as African.

30 minAmara

African Mango and Cucumber Salad

This is an East African salad of mango, cucumber and tomato with chilli, cumin and a little cinnamon, dressed with lime and finished with roasted peanuts. It is served on its own or alongside grilled meat, and its appeal is the contrast: crunchy against soft, sweet against tart. Mangoes are not indigenous to Africa. They reached the East African coast through Persian traders around the tenth century, part of the same Indian Ocean exchange that brought rice, spices and coconut into Swahili cooking, and they have been grown and eaten there ever since. Kenya and Tanzania are now substantial producers. The seasoning is what places it. Cumin with a dash of cinnamon in a fruit salad is a Swahili coast combination rather than a Western one, reflecting the same trade history, and the peanuts and lime give it the texture and acidity that hold the whole thing together. Salting the cucumber and onion first and letting them drain for twenty minutes is the technique that matters most: cucumber holds a great deal of water, and skipping it leaves a salad sitting in liquid within minutes of being dressed.

Kenya25 minAmara

Fried Whole Tilapia

Frying a tilapia whole is one of the most common ways it is eaten across West Africa, and it is a different proposition from cooking fillets. The skin crisps, the flesh stays moist against the bone, and the head and tail crisp up alongside, which many people consider the best part. Tilapia is a freshwater fish of shallow streams, ponds, rivers and lakes, native to Africa and now farmed on an enormous scale worldwide. That scale is why it is cheap and widely available, and it has become one of the most consumed fish in the world. It is bony, which puts some people off, and worth the small amount of care that eating it requires. The technique here is scoring and shallow frying rather than deep frying. Diagonal cuts across both sides let the spice paste reach the flesh rather than sitting on the skin, and they help the fish cook evenly through the thickest part. Turmeric, garlic, black pepper and habanero form the rub. Tilting the pan so the head and tail are submitted to the oil in turn is a small detail that matters: those parts sit above the oil line otherwise and stay soft while the middle crisps.

Nigeria30 minAnthonyJ

Palm Wine Cocktail

Palm wine is the sap of palm trees, collected and left to ferment, and it is drunk across West and Central Africa. It is called nsafufuo in Ghana and emu in Nigeria, where ogogoro refers to the distilled spirit made from it rather than the wine itself. Tapping is a specialised job. Tappers climb to the upper part of the tree, where the sap is drawn from the crown, or a felled trunk is opened and the sap collected in jars. What comes out is white, sweet and barely alcoholic, and it begins fermenting the moment it is exposed to the wild yeasts in the air. Within about two hours it has developed roughly the alcohol content of a beer, and it keeps getting stronger and more sour from there. That speed explains everything about how it is sold. Traditional producers sell immediately after extraction because the drink changes hour by hour: sweet and mild in the morning, sharp and considerably stronger by evening. There is no way to hold it at a chosen point without modern processing. This recipe is the simplest possible serving, palm wine over ice with citrus and berries, and its purpose is to show what to do with a bottle rather than to teach a technique.

Nigeria8 minBlessing

African Native Sauce

Native sauce is a palm oil sauce with smoked fish, crayfish and pumpkin leaves, made in southern Nigeria and served alongside roasted or plain starches. Native in this context means locally sourced and traditionally seasoned rather than anything about the technique, and it distinguishes the sauce from tomato-based stews. What defines it is the absence of tomato. Palm oil, blended pepper, onion, crayfish and smoked fish carry the whole thing, and the result is darker, oilier and considerably more savoury than a stew built on tomato. The same principle produces native jollof rice and the family of dishes described as native across southeastern Nigeria. Ugwu goes in at the end and needs only a few minutes to wilt while keeping its colour. The sauce is quick, around twenty-five minutes from start to finish, which is unusual for a Nigerian sauce with this depth of flavour, and it comes from the fact that the smoked fish and crayfish are already concentrated. It is served with roasted yam or plantain, or with any starch, and it functions as a sauce to be spooned over rather than as a soup to be eaten with a swallow.

Nigeria25 minSobecooks

Nigerian Chapman

Chapman is Nigeria's best known mixed drink, a deep red fruity cooler served in dimpled beer mugs at parties, bars and restaurants across the country. It is made from two soft drinks, grenadine syrup, cucumber, citrus and mint, and it is as common at a Lagos owambe as jollof rice. Whether it is alcohol free depends entirely on how it is made, and this matters more than most people assume. Angostura bitters is a standard ingredient and is around 45 percent alcohol by volume. The quantity used is small, so the finished drink is only very lightly alcoholic, but it is not a true mocktail unless the bitters are left out, which is what is done when it is served to children. The cucumber is not garnish. Sliced into the jug it releases a cool, faintly vegetal note that cuts the sweetness of the two soft drinks and the grenadine, and a chapman without it tastes markedly flatter. The other detail worth following is freezing soft drink into the ice cubes rather than using water ice, so the drink does not dilute as it stands, which matters at a party where a jug sits out.

Nigeria10 minJennifer

Mazagran

Mazagran is strong coffee poured over ice with lemon and sugar, and it has a fair claim to being the original iced coffee. It takes its name from Mazagran in Algeria, and it is Algerian in origin even though it is now far better known in Portugal. The lemon has a practical history. It was added to improve the flavour of low quality coffee beans, which is a origin story shared by a good many drinks, and it turned out to make something worth drinking in its own right. The combination of citrus acidity against the bitterness of strong coffee is what the drink is, and good beans are not wasted on it. It is traditionally served in a tall narrow glass, and there is an eponymous porcelain or clay vessel of the same name. The Portuguese version is the one most people encounter, sometimes made with espresso and lemon, sometimes with rum added. The recipe here is a Nespresso-branded version, which is worth noting: it specifies particular capsules, and any strong espresso or very strong brewed coffee substitutes. What it does not include, oddly, is the lemon that the article itself identifies as the defining ingredient.

Algeria5 minBlessing

Green Seasoning

Green seasoning is a blended paste of fresh herbs, aromatics and chilli, used across the Caribbean as an all-purpose marinade and flavour base. Trinidad and Tobago is where it is most identified, and Guyana, Jamaica and the wider region all have versions. The source describes it as known to the Caribbean and some parts of Africa, which is a fair way of putting it. Its home is the Caribbean. What it resembles in Africa is a family of green pastes that do similar work: Senegalese nokoss, Moroccan chermoula, and the blended pepper bases used across West Africa. Those are related in function rather than in origin, and green seasoning as it is made here is Caribbean. It goes on everything: meat, seafood, grains, stews. Composition varies enormously by household and island, and the version here is a modest one built on parsley, coriander, celery, onion, garlic, scotch bonnet and thyme. Bigger versions include chive, culantro, pimento peppers and ginger. It keeps about a week refrigerated, and freezing it in ice cube trays is the standard way to hold a large batch, which is how most Caribbean kitchens handle it.

10 minDebby

Shlada, a Moroccan salad of finely chopped tomato, cucumber and onion with cumin

Shlada (Moroccan Tomato Salad)

Shlada is the Moroccan tomato and cucumber salad, dressed with lemon and olive oil and seasoned with cumin. It goes by shlada 'arobiya, meaning country salad, and shlada Nationale, the national salad, which tells you how ordinary and how ubiquitous it is. Everything depends on the knife work. The tomatoes, cucumber and onion are chopped very small, so that a single spoonful carries all three rather than one at a time. The contributor is emphatic that this is the secret of the salad, and it is a fair claim: the same ingredients in rough chunks make a quite different and much less interesting dish. It also needs to sit. Ten minutes before serving lets the flavours combine, and up to an hour improves it further, which is unusual for a salad. Preserved lemon peel is the optional addition that makes it unmistakably Moroccan, and only the peel is used, never the pulp. It is eaten as a side, as a light lunch, and as a dip scooped up with khobz, the Moroccan bread. Parsley substitutes for mint, vinegar for lemon juice, and vegetable oil for olive oil, all of which are made.

Morocco15 minBlessing

African Pepper Sauce

Pepper sauce is the West African condiment: blended hot pepper cooked down in oil or water until thick, spooned onto anything that needs lifting. It goes with puff puff, grilled meat, fish and eggs, and there is scarcely a dish it is not served alongside somewhere in the region. What distinguishes it from a hot sauce elsewhere is what it does not have. There is no vinegar, no fermentation and usually no sugar. The base is pepper, salt, oil and often a stock cube, and the texture is thick and coarse rather than pourable. Recipes vary with the cook, but hot pepper is the constant, and habanero and scotch bonnet are the usual choices. Heat is adjustable and worth adjusting. Most West African pepper sauces are fierce, and this one uses three habaneros against four bell peppers, which is moderate by regional standards. Deseeding the habaneros, using fewer, or leaving them out entirely all work. The other choice is water or oil: water reduces away and gives a lighter sauce that keeps about a week; oil floats to the top when the sauce is done and seals it, which keeps it considerably longer. No country is named, and the sauce belongs to the whole region rather than to one.

30 minBlessing

Recettes

Recettes à la une

Homemade Pilau Masala

Dawa

Nigerian Jollof Spaghetti

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Funge

Igbo Yam Porridge

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Funge

Igbo Yam Porridge

Semovita

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Amala

Easy Ways To Make Nigerian Pounded Yam

Djablani

Ogi (Nigerian Pap)

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Alkubus

Okro Soup

Nigerian Jollof Spaghetti

Dawa

Jollof Couscous

Afang Soup

Chakalaka Boerewors

Homemade Pilau Masala

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

Fish Seasoning

Millet Porridge

Pineapple, Turmeric and Ginger Juice

Chicken Kebabs

African Mango and Cucumber Salad

Fried Whole Tilapia

Palm Wine Cocktail

African Native Sauce

Nigerian Chapman

Mazagran

Green Seasoning

Shlada (Moroccan Tomato Salad)

African Pepper Sauce

Air Fryer Baby Potatoes

Corn Dough Porridge

Fried Plantain

Ful Medames