Recettes

Homemade Chicken Mayo Pies

The chicken mayo pie is a hand pie: a short, buttery pastry case around a filling of shredded chicken bound with mayonnaise and softened onion and pepper, baked until the top browns. It is designed to be eaten standing up, out of a paper bag, without a plate or cutlery. Handheld savoury pies occupy a particular position in Southern African food culture, where they are sold from bakeries, supermarket warmers and roadside outlets and eaten as a fast, complete portable meal. The chicken and mayonnaise filling is one of the most common versions in that category, alongside steak and kidney, chicken and mushroom, and mince. The dish's lineage is European rather than African. The short crust hand pie came with British and Dutch settlement across Southern and East Africa and was absorbed into the local eating economy so thoroughly that its origins are no longer visible in how it is eaten. What is African about it is that absorption: a pie bought at a garage forecourt on the way to work is a normal part of the day across several countries on the continent, and the mayonnaise binding is a local preference rather than a British one.

1 hriam.nkay

Gullisuwa

Gullisuwa is a Hausa fried pastry from Northern Nigeria, made from wheat flour worked with ground roasted peanuts and fried until crisp. The groundnuts are what distinguish it. They give the pastry a toasted, faintly sweet base that a plain flour dough does not have, and groundnuts are one of the defining crops of the northern Nigerian savannah. It belongs to celebration rather than to the everyday. Gullisuwa appears at weddings, at festive occasions and as street food, made in quantity because it keeps well and travels well, and it is offered to guests as part of the spread rather than served as a course. That is the usual position of a fried snack in Hausa hospitality: present, plentiful and not the point of the meal. Its exact origin is not documented. What can be said is that it belongs to the Hausa, that it has been made for generations, and that Northern Nigeria's long trade and cultural connection with the Sahara and the Arab world is visible in a good deal of its sweet and fried food. Beyond that, the specific lineage of gullisuwa is not recorded, and the honest position is to say so rather than to construct one.

Nigeria50 minLaila

A Nigerian style pasta salad with macaroni, carrots, sweetcorn, peas and boiled egg in a mayonnaise dressing

Simple Pasta Salad Recipe (With Video)

The mayonnaise dressed vegetable salad is a fixture of the Nigerian party table, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is not a salad in the European sense at all. There are no leaves at the centre of it. It is built on cooked vegetables, sweetcorn, egg and sometimes macaroni or baked beans, bound in mayonnaise and evaporated milk, and it is served cold in a large bowl alongside jollof rice and fried plantain. It arrived through colonial and post independence British influence on Nigerian catering, and it has been thoroughly domesticated since. The evaporated milk in the dressing is the clearest marker of that: it is not a British addition, and it gives the dressing a sweetness and a thinner consistency than mayonnaise alone. Nigerians of a certain age associate it directly with owambe, the large celebration parties where the food is served in quantity. This particular recipe is a contemporary quick version rather than a documented traditional dish. It uses macaroni, carrot, peas, sweetcorn, lettuce and egg with a mayonnaise and milk dressing, and it is presented by its author as an everyday meal rather than as party food. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to that broader Nigerian salad practice; what cannot be established from the source is any particular lineage for the recipe itself.

Nigeria35 minAmako Blessing

Nigerian Buns

Nigerian buns are fried dough balls with a crunchy outer crust and a soft, cake like interior. They sit alongside puff puff and chin chin in the small group of fried snacks that account for most of what Nigerians eat between meals, and the differences between the three are understood precisely by anyone who grew up with them. Buns are the rich one. Where puff puff is yeast raised and made from almost nothing, buns use baking powder for lift and include egg, butter and milk, which produces a denser, sweeter, more substantial thing with a genuinely crunchy shell. They also absorb less oil in the frying, which is a real practical advantage and a point people make in their favour. They are everywhere: sold from roadside trays and by hawkers, made at home for children after school, brought to parties and picnics, and eaten with tea at breakfast. The flavouring is open, with nutmeg the most common and cinnamon and vanilla both standard, and every household has a version that is slightly sweeter or slightly denser than the next. They are best hot and are still good at room temperature, which is most of what a snack needs to be.

Nigeria35 minBeatrice

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

Nigerian Egg Roll

The Nigerian egg roll is a whole hard cooked egg wrapped in a slightly sweet dough and deep fried, and it has nothing to do with the Chinese egg roll beyond the name. The closest comparison is a Scotch egg, with dough in place of sausage meat, and the resemblance ends at the structure. It is street food and travel food. Egg rolls are sold from glass cases at bus stops, from hawkers' trays in traffic, and from the small kiosks that cluster around Lagos offices, and they exist because they solve a specific problem: something substantial, cheap and self contained that can be eaten with one hand in a stationary car. Anyone who has spent time in Lagos traffic understands the appeal without further explanation. The dough is what makes it Nigerian rather than generic. Flour, baking powder, sugar, margarine and nutmeg produce something between a bread and a cake, faintly sweet against the plain salted egg inside, and that sweet and savoury combination is a Nigerian snack signature that also runs through buns, puff puff and chin chin. It is eaten with tea, fruit juice or chilled zobo, and it is substantial enough that people eat it as breakfast or lunch rather than as a snack.

Nigeria50 minDebby

Ivorian Jollof Rice

Ivorian jollof is the Francophone entry in a dish the Anglophone countries argue about most loudly. It carries the same tomato base as its neighbours and seasons it with curry powder, thyme, ginger, garlic and scotch bonnet, and it commonly cooks the cabbage and carrots in the pot with the rice rather than serving them separately. Côte d'Ivoire calls it jollof, and the wider Francophone West African name for the family is riz gras, meaning fat rice. That name describes the method accurately: rice cooked in an oil rich tomato broth until it takes all of it up. In Côte d'Ivoire the dish belongs to the same occasions it does everywhere else in the region, which is to say weddings, funerals, naming ceremonies and any gathering that expects to feed a crowd from one pot. The origin is not seriously disputed by anyone who looks into it. Jollof descends from the rice tradition of the Senegambian coast, associated with the Jolof polity that held parts of present day Senegal and the Gambia between roughly 1350 and 1549, in a region documented as the Rice Coast for the grains grown along the Senegal River. One account traces its spread through the Djula traders of the Mali empire. Neither Nigeria nor Ghana invented it, which neither country lets get in the way of the argument.

Côte d'Ivoire1 hrCuisine228

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

Milo Cake

Milo is a malted chocolate drink powder made by Nestlé, and across West Africa, East Africa and much of the Global South it is a household fixture in a way that is difficult to overstate. It is drunk hot and cold, eaten dry from the tin by children who are not supposed to, and used as a baking ingredient in place of cocoa powder. That last use is what this recipe is. Milo cake is a home baking staple across Ghana, Nigeria, Togo and beyond, made because Milo is in the cupboard and cocoa powder often is not, and because the malt in it gives a flavour that plain cocoa does not have. The result is closer to a malted chocolate cake than to a straightforward chocolate one. It is worth being clear about what this is and is not. Milo cake is a genuine part of contemporary West African home baking, made in ordinary kitchens across the region, and it belongs to the same category as the condensed milk and evaporated milk cooking that runs through the area's domestic food. It is not a heritage dish, it has no documented lineage, and it is built on a commercial product owned by a Swiss company. All of those things are true at once, and none of them stops it being what people actually bake.

55 minCuisine228

Liver suya, Nigerian spiced liver kebabs coated in groundnut and pepper yaji and grilled on skewers

Liver Suya (Liver Kebab)

Suya is not restricted to any one cut, and liver is among the most common of the alternatives. Kidney and tripe appear too, and the offal versions are cheaper, cook faster and carry the yaji spice differently from beef, which is a large part of why they have their own following rather than being a fallback. Liver takes spice better than muscle meat does. It is soft, mineral and slightly sweet, and it absorbs the groundnut and pepper coating almost immediately rather than needing time to marinate. It also cooks in minutes, which suits the trade: a suya vendor working a roadside grill at night needs something that goes from raw to served while the customer waits. The name changes across West Africa without the thing changing much. Suya in Nigeria, soya in Cameroon, chinchinga or sitsinga in Ghana, and brochettes in the Francophone countries. The spice blend, yaji, is what holds it together, and it has no fixed recipe: the composition varies by vendor and by region, and each is guarded. What is consistent is ground groundnut, chilli, ginger and garlic, and a heat level that varies from cook to cook while the intensity of flavour does not.

Nigeria45 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

Egyptian Kofta

Kofta is minced meat, seasoned and shaped by hand, and it runs across an enormous stretch of the world: from the Balkans through Turkey, the Levant and Egypt, across the Arabian peninsula, into Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and along the North African coast. The Egyptian version is lamb or beef with onion, parsley, mint and a warm spice mix, moulded onto skewers and grilled. Its written history is old. Recipes appear in the earliest surviving Arab cookbooks, where large ground lamb meatballs were glazed in saffron and egg yolk, a technique that later reached Europe and was known there as gilding or endoring. From the Arab world it travelled east, and nargisi kofta was served at the Mughal court in India. In Egypt, kofta belongs to the grilled meat restaurants that exist in every town, where it is cooked alongside kebab, grilled chicken and tarb and served with rice, bread and salad. The distinction Egyptians draw between kofta and kebab is worth knowing: kebab is cubed meat on a skewer, kofta is minced meat shaped by hand. It is essentially sausage without a casing, and the comparison to a hamburger, sometimes made, misses that it is almost never served in bread.

Egypt1 hrCuisine228

Benne Cakes

Benne is the Wolof and Bambara word for sesame, and it is the word that carries this dish's history. Sesame was cultivated across West Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved West Africans carried the seed and the word with them to the Americas, where both survived. Benne cakes as they exist today are most strongly associated with the Gullah Geechee communities of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, where the seed was planted, the name was kept, and the thin crisp sesame wafer became a regional speciality that Charleston still sells. That makes them a diaspora food rather than a West African one: African in origin, African in name, and developed into their current form on the other side of the ocean. The association with good luck travelled too, and it is the reason benne cakes appear at Kwanzaa, the African American celebration established in 1966, where they are served as a snack before the meal. The source for this recipe places them in West Africa and gives Ghana, Nigeria and Togo as the cuisine, which is where the seed and the word come from rather than where this particular cookie was developed. Both halves of that story are true and neither is complete on its own.

45 minBeatrice

Catfish and Carrot Sauce

Catfish is everywhere in Nigeria now, and the reason is farming rather than fishing. Catfish aquaculture expanded enormously across the country from the 1990s onward, at both household and commercial scale, and a fish that was once a river catch became one of the most available proteins in the market. Dishes built around it have multiplied accordingly. This one is a contemporary Nigerian preparation rather than an inherited dish. Carrot and tomato are blended into a sauce in a three to one ratio, so the carrot rather than the tomato carries it, giving a sweeter and thicker base than a standard Nigerian stew. The fish is marinated, grilled or baked separately, and set into the sauce at the end rather than cooked in it. Cleaning is the part that determines whether it works. Catfish is naturally slimy and has to be scrubbed with salt, alum, potash or maize chaff, and soaking it briefly in hot water both removes the remaining slime and firms the flesh so it holds together instead of breaking apart. Grilling rather than frying keeps that firmness. It is served with rice, potato or yam.

Nigeria50 minMaryam

Mhajab, a North African stuffed flatbread folded into layers and cooked on a griddle

Mhajab - A Traditional North African Dish

Mhajab is a stuffed North African flatbread, and the technique is what makes it. A soft dough is stretched out until it is thin enough to see through, folded in from the sides and then from the top and bottom into a square parcel around a filling, and cooked flat on a griddle. The folding creates the layers, and the layers are the dish. It belongs to Algeria and Morocco and is closely related to the Moroccan msemen and rghaif, which use the same stretch and fold method without a filling. Mhajab is street food and it is household food for special occasions, which is a combination that usually indicates something that takes skill but not money. The filling is conventionally a cooked mixture of onion, tomato and pepper, sometimes with meat, and the version here uses beef with potato and carrot. Vegetable fillings are as common as meat ones. It is eaten on its own, or served alongside couscous, harira and salads with mint tea. Cooked on a griddle it comes out crisp outside and soft within; baked it is softer throughout and takes longer, which is the trade the source lays out honestly.

Algeria50 minDebby

Kisra

Kisra, also spelled kissra, is the fermented flatbread of Sudan, South Sudan and Chad, made from sorghum flour left to ferment overnight and spread paper thin on a hot griddle. It is a staple rather than an accompaniment, and in Sudan its production has become a home based industry supplying households that no longer make it themselves. It comes in two forms. Kisra rhaheefa is the thin baked sheet, closely comparable to Ethiopian injera in appearance and in the lactic fermentation that produces it, though made from sorghum rather than teff. Kisra aseeda, also called aceda, is the same base cooked into a thick porridge instead. The two are eaten in different contexts and both are called kisra. The fermentation is what determines quality, and Sudanese cooks judge it by several variables at once: the sorghum genotype, the age and strength of the starter, the temperature and the time. Lactic acid bacteria and yeast do the work, producing the acids and alcohols that give kisra its sour flavour and its aroma. A weak or young starter gives a bland bread, which is why starters are kept going and shared between households.

Sudan45 minNympha

Kuli Kuli

Kuli kuli is a peanut snack eaten across Nigeria, Benin, northern Cameroon and Ghana, and it is one of the most widely recognised street foods in West Africa. It is made from peanuts alone, and the technique is what makes it: the oil is deliberately pressed out of the ground paste before the remaining solids are shaped and fried. That extraction is the point. Removing the oil leaves a dense, dry paste that fries into something genuinely crunchy rather than soft, and it also produces the frying oil as a by-product, so nothing is wasted. It is a piece of processing knowledge that predates industrial oil pressing and is still done by hand in Hausa communities in northern Nigeria, where the snack has its strongest association. It takes different shapes in different places: small sticks, rings, flat discs and irregular pieces are all standard, and the form varies by region and by seller. English names for it, groundnut cake and peanut snack among them, are approximations rather than translations. Kuli kuli is eaten on its own, mixed into garri with sugar and water, crumbled over salad, or served alongside fura and koko. Crushed to a powder it becomes the peanut component of suya spice, which is where most people outside the region encounter it without knowing.

Nigeria35 minBlessing

Chin Chin

Chin chin is fried dough cut into small pieces, and it is the most widely eaten snack in Nigeria. The texture sits between a cracker and a dry cake, and how hard it should be is the thing people have opinions about, with preferences running from soft and cakey to properly tooth breaking. It began as occasion food, made for birthdays and for Christmas, and the making of it was a household event that children were put to work on. That has changed: it is now sold at every street corner, in every grocery store and supermarket, and it is as ordinary as a packet of biscuits. It is also made across West Africa, and Ghanaians call it achomo. Flour, sugar, milk and butter are the base, with eggs, nutmeg and baking powder optional depending on the texture wanted. Nutmeg is the flavouring most associated with the Nigerian version, and the variations run to cinnamon, vanilla, cocoa and ground pepper. The three levers are simple enough to state: more butter and baking powder makes it soft, leaving out the egg and the baking powder makes it hard, and everything else is a matter of where between those you want to land.

Nigeria50 minBeatrice

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

Toaster Pancakes

These are buttermilk pancakes with whipped egg white folded through and chocolate chunks added, cooked in a sandwich toaster rather than in a pan. The source claims no country and no tradition for them, and none is claimed here. The technique is the only distinctive thing about them. Cooking pancake batter in a toaster or sandwich press presses the batter between two heated plates rather than cooking it from one side at a time, so it sets faster and comes out with a flatter, more even surface and a slight crispness at the edges. It is a domestic improvisation rather than an inherited method. Separating the eggs and folding whipped whites into the batter is the part worth keeping regardless of what you cook them in. It is the same principle behind a souffléd pancake, and it gives a noticeably lighter result than a straight batter. Buttermilk contributes the tang and reacts with the raising agent. This entry is included as it was found in the archive, filed under Worldwide Recipes, since it belongs to no particular cuisine.

40 minErmanuella Ben

Baseema

Baseema is a Sudanese semolina-style coconut cake soaked in sugar syrup, and the name means scrumptious in Sudanese Arabic. It is one of the country's best regarded sweets, made for guests and for occasions, and it belongs to the wider family of syrup-soaked cakes found across North Africa and the Middle East. Desiccated coconut is what distinguishes it. Egyptian basbousa and Levantine namoura are close relatives built on the same principle of a dense cake flooded with syrup while hot, but baseema leans on coconut and yoghurt for its flavour and its texture, giving something moister and less grainy than a straight semolina cake. Vanilla and cinnamon carry it, alongside rose water in some households. The syrup is the whole technique and the timing is unforgiving. It is prepared first and left to cool while the cake bakes, then poured over the moment the cake leaves the oven, so that hot cake meets cool syrup and drinks it in rather than sitting in a pool. Getting that the wrong way round, or letting the cake cool first, is how baseema fails. Everything else about it is straightforward, which is much of why Sudanese cooks make it often.

Sudan1 hrNympha

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

Meni-Meniyong

Meni-meniyong is a Malian sesame and honey brittle, cut into rectangles and sold from stalls in every market in the country. It is three ingredients and a piece of temperature judgement, and it is eaten as a sweet with tea or simply as something to buy while the shopping is being done. Mali is a substantial sesame producer and the crop is one of its larger exports, so the seed is local rather than imported, and the brittle is one of the more direct expressions of that. The traditional form is rectangular, which is how it appears on market stalls, though the shape is a convention rather than a rule. Honey is what it should be made with. Sugar is increasingly substituted because it is cheaper, and the difference in flavour is noticeable to anyone who has had both. The temperature of the honey and butter mixture is the thing that decides whether it works: cooked too long and the brittle sets rock hard, not long enough and it stays as toffee rather than setting at all. A batch that will not firm up can be returned to the pan and cooked further, which makes it more forgiving than most sugar work.

Mali35 minFoodChef

Oven Baked Tilapia

Tilapia is native to Africa, including Ghana, and it is one of the fish Ghanaians eat most. It belongs to the Cichlidae family, grows fast, and has a mild flavour and tender flaky flesh that takes on whatever seasoning it is given, which is why it appears in so many different preparations. In Ghana it is most closely associated with banku, the fermented corn and cassava dough. Grilled tilapia with banku and a fierce pepper sauce is one of the country's defining meals, sold from roadside grills and chop bars and eaten with the fingers. The tang of the fermented banku against the mild fish is the whole reason the pairing works. This version bakes rather than grills, which is the practical domestic method and gives a cleaner result without a charcoal grill. The seasoning is a marinade rather than a rub, built on oil, garlic, ginger, chilli and soy sauce, and the source names two commercial Ghanaian spice blends among the ingredients. Any all purpose seasoning stands in. Banku and tilapia is generally eaten as lunch or dinner rather than breakfast, though the source is relaxed about that, noting there are no strict rules.

Ghana40 minSandynanayaa

Rock Buns

Rock buns are a British baked good, and the source says so plainly. Small, rough textured cakes made from flour, sugar, fat, eggs and dried fruit, they take their name from their craggy appearance rather than from their texture, which is tender and crumbly inside. They belong to British home baking of a particular era, when a cheap, quick cake made from pantry staples and eaten with tea was a household standard. The rough shape is not a matter of rusticity for its own sake: the dough is deliberately not shaped, only spooned onto a tray, and the peaks that form are what give the bun its name and its crisp edges. They travelled with the British empire and are still widely baked in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and across the Caribbean, where they turn up in school canteens, bakeries and home kitchens and are treated as entirely local. That is a real part of their story, and it is why one appears in this archive. But the bun itself is British in origin, so it sits in the Worldwide Recipes collection rather than being presented as an African dish.

United Kingdom40 miniam.nkay

Tajin sibnekh, a Tunisian baked egg dish with chicken, potato, spinach and harissa

Tajin Sibnekh (Tunisian Chicken and Egg Bake)

A Tunisian tajine is not a Moroccan tagine, and this dish is the clearest illustration of the difference. Moroccan tagine means a stew cooked slowly in a clay pot under a conical lid. Tunisian tajin, or tajin sibnekh, means a baked egg dish, set firm and cut into squares, much closer to an Italian frittata or a Spanish tortilla. The confusion is entirely reasonable and entirely common. The same word travelled to two North African countries and attached itself to two different things. In Tunisia the dish is built from eggs beaten with whatever else is going: potatoes, chicken, spinach, peas, cheese, and the North African spices that mark it as Tunisian rather than European. Harissa and ras el hanout do that marking. Harissa is Tunisia's chilli paste and its most exported product; ras el hanout is the layered spice blend used across the Maghreb. Together they give an egg bake a warmth and heat that a frittata does not have. It is usually served as a starter, though it is substantial enough to be a meal, and it is as good cold the next day as it is hot, which makes it packed lunch and picnic food across the country.

Tunisia50 minFoodChef

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

South African Picnic Bread sliced to reveal cheese, bacon, and spring onion filling, a popular braai bread from South Africa

Picnic Bread (From South Africa)

Picnic bread is a South African savoury quick bread, heavy with cheese, spring onion and bacon, bound with egg, and made to be eaten cold in a slice with nothing on it. The category matters. It is a quick bread, raised chemically rather than with yeast, which means no proving and no kneading. Everything is mixed and baked. That is much of why it exists: it is a bread that can be made in an evening for the next day without planning. Its association is with food carried away from home. It is described as an old recipe favoured by fishermen for their packed lunches and by schoolchildren, and the reasoning is visible in the recipe itself. It needs no butter because there is enough fat in it already. It holds together in a slice rather than crumbling. It does not dry out the way a plain loaf does. And it is dense enough that one slice is a meal rather than an accompaniment, which is exactly what you want on a boat or a long day out. The texture is unusual for a bread. It is moist, almost pudding-like in the middle, without being heavy, and the cheese keeps it soft for days. It is honest about what it is: nobody has ever pretended this is a low-fat recipe.

South Africa55 minFoodChef

Akwadu

Akwadu is baked banana with coconut, and it belongs to Equatorial Guinea, one of the few Spanish speaking countries in Africa. Bananas are split, dressed with butter, citrus juice and brown sugar, covered in shredded coconut and baked until the sugar caramelises and the coconut toasts. The combination is coastal Central African: bananas and coconut both grow there in quantity, and the citrus and sugar are the only additions. There is nothing complicated about it, and its appeal is the contrast between the soft, almost jammy fruit and the crisp toasted coconut on top. Two versions exist and both are given here. Leaving the skins on and splitting the bananas lengthways lets them act as their own dish, holding the juices that collect and can be spooned back over during baking, and this takes about twenty minutes. Slicing peeled bananas into a dish is quicker, around ten minutes, and gives a softer result. Ripe plantain works in place of banana and is firmer, which some people prefer. The honey is added at the end rather than the start, so it does not burn under the grill.

Equatorial Guinea35 minNympha

Meat Bread

Meat bread is spiced minced meat baked in a yeasted dough, and the source places it squarely in Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and European cooking rather than African. It names three relatives: lahmacun in Turkey, arayes in Lebanon, and runza in the American Midwest. Those three are not quite the same thing as each other, which is worth knowing. Lahmacun is a very thin round of dough spread with minced lamb and baked flat, folded to eat. Arayes is pitta stuffed with spiced meat and grilled or fried. Runza is a Midwestern American bread pocket filled with beef, cabbage and onion, brought by Volga German immigrants. The version here is closest to arayes in spirit and to a folded pasty in form: rounds of dough filled, sealed into half moons and baked. The seasoning is Levantine, cumin, paprika and a little cinnamon with tomato and peppers, and the suggested accompaniments are yoghurt and tahini. North Africa has its own filled breads that this is not: Moroccan msemen and batbout, Tunisian brik, Egyptian hawawshi, which is minced spiced meat baked inside baladi bread and is the closest African equivalent. This entry sits in Worldwide Recipes with its URL unchanged.

50 minDebby

Yassa Fish and Shrimp

Poisson yassa is the fish version of Senegal's best known dish, and it works on the same principle as chicken yassa: a marinade of lemon, mustard, garlic and onion that becomes the sauce, with a very large quantity of onion cooked down into it. Yassa comes from the Casamance region in southern Senegal and is now made across the country and throughout the Senegalese diaspora. The mustard is a French ingredient absorbed entirely into a Senegalese idiom, and the resemblance the source draws to a French sauce à l'onion is fair as far as it goes, though yassa is sharper and carries far more onion. Four large onions to two and a half pounds of fish is the ratio, and it is not a mistake. The onions cook down into a soft, tangy mass that is as much the dish as the fish is. The technique is straightforward: marinate, cook the fish and set it aside, cook the onions in the leftover marinade, then return the fish to warm through in the sauce. Shrimp can go in alongside. It is served with rice most often, though this version suggests potatoes.

Senegal40 minCuisine228

Recettes

Recettes à la une