Recettes

Dombolo, a South African steamed bread, cut into wedges and served with stew

Dombolo (Dumplings or Steamed Bread)

Dombolo is South African steamed bread, and it occupies a particular place in the country's kitchens because it is bread that never sees an oven. Where a loaf is baked in dry heat, dombolo rises under a lid over water, and the result is soft, dense and slightly damp in a way no baked bread achieves. It belongs to the stew. Dombolo is not eaten alone and is not a side thought about separately. It arrives with chicken stew, beef stew, oxtail, lamb or tripe, and its job is to take up the gravy that the meat has spent hours building. In Zulu households the same technique produces jeqe, and the distinction between the two names is one that South Africans hold firmly even when it is drawn differently from one family to the next: broadly, jeqe is steamed as its own loaf, while dombolo is the dough set to rise over the pot the stew is already in. It is Sunday food and gathering food, made in quantity, cut into wedges at the table, and eaten with the hands.

South Africa3 hr 30 minAmara

Potjiekos, a South African stew cooked in a three legged cast iron pot over an open fire

Potjiekos (Afrikaans Stew on the Fire)

Potjiekos takes its name from its vessel. A potjie is the round, three legged cast iron pot that sits directly in the embers, and potjiekos, pronounced poi-key-kos, is simply the food that comes out of it. The pot is a descendant of the Dutch oven brought to the Cape in the 17th century, and it is now found in households across southern Africa. The defining rule of a potjie is that it is not stirred. Ingredients are layered, meat at the bottom, vegetables above it in the order of how long they need, and the lid stays on. What comes out is not a stew in the ordinary sense: the layers hold something of their own identity rather than dissolving into a common sauce, and that separation is the point of the method. It is also a social form. A potjie runs for three to six hours, and the cooking is the occasion rather than the preparation for one. People sit around the fire while it happens. South Africans distinguish it from a braai, which is the other great outdoor cooking institution, and rank the two as the country's twin claims on the fire.

South AfricaAmara

Ablo, a steamed rice cake from Benin and Togo, served warm alongside a stew

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.

Benin2 hr 10 minAnthonyJ

Madeeda Hilba (Sudani Fenugreek Porridge)

Madeeda hilba is a Sudanese fenugreek porridge, thick enough to set like custard, sweetened and enriched with milk. Its name is Arabic: madeeda for the porridge, hilba for the fenugreek that defines it. Its place in the Sudanese year is Ramadan, when it is served as a dessert after the fast is broken. A thick, sweet, milk based dish at the end of a day without food is a specific piece of practical wisdom, and madeeda hilba is one of a small number of dishes that appear on Sudanese tables in that month and rarely outside it. Fenugreek carries a second role. Sudanese households hold that it eases aches and settles the stomach, and the porridge is made for kerijo, the term for a woman who has recently given birth, on the understanding that it supports milk production. That the same dish serves both the Ramadan table and the postpartum household is not a coincidence: fenugreek's association with nursing mothers runs across North and East Africa, the Arabian peninsula and South Asia, wherever the seed is used in cooking. Madeeda hilba is what Sudan does with it.

SudanNympha

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

Tapalapa

Tapalapa is a West African bread: a dense, chewy loaf with a firm crust, baked long and scored across the top, and sold from roadside ovens and small bakeries rather than from supermarkets. It is bought fresh in the morning, torn rather than sliced, and eaten with whatever the household has. Its role is that of daily bread in the most literal sense. In the countries where it is baked, the tapalapa loaf is a breakfast item, split and filled with beans, egg, fried fish or a spread, and it is also what appears alongside a stew at other times of day. Baked in a wood fired oven, which is how most of it is still produced, it takes on a crust and a faint smokiness that a domestic oven does not reproduce. The bread belongs to a wider West African tradition of European style leavened loaves that were absorbed into local baking and then developed independently, arriving somewhere quite distinct from any European original. Tapalapa is denser and chewier than a baguette, keeps considerably better, and is built to hold a filling without collapsing. The countries of the region that bake it treat it as their own, and the question of exactly where it began is not settled.

2 hrLaila

Rwandan Banana Beignets

Bananas are central to Rwandan agriculture and to Rwandan eating in a way that has no equivalent in most of the world. The country grows dozens of varieties, distinguished by whether they are for cooking, for eating fresh or for brewing, and the plant occupies hillside smallholdings across the country. A snack built on ripe banana is not a novelty in Rwanda; it is the obvious use of what is there. These beignets are small fried cakes of mashed ripe banana in a light batter, crisp at the edge and soft through the middle, sometimes spiced with cinnamon or nutmeg. They are sold from street stalls and market stands, fried in batches through the day, and eaten hot and standing up. At home they appear at gatherings and family celebrations. The variety of banana matters to the result. Rwandan cooks use small, sweet local bananas rather than the large export Cavendish, and the difference is not cosmetic: the smaller fruit is sweeter and denser, which means the batter needs less sugar and the finished beignet is less wet. Where those bananas are not available the recipe still works, but it works differently, and that is worth knowing before judging the result.

Rwanda1 hr 20 minLaila

Mebos

Mebos is one of the oldest sweets of the Cape: ripe apricots cured in brine, dried in the sun, and packed in layers of sugar until they carry salt and sweetness at the same time. The combination is unusual in European confectionery and entirely normal in the Cape, where the preserving traditions of several continents met and stayed. Its name records that meeting. Mebos is generally traced either to the Japanese umeboshi, the salted pickled plum, or to the Arabic mishmish, meaning apricot, and both routes point to the maritime trade that shaped Cape food. Either way the word arrived from outside and the thing itself became local. It is preserving food rather than confectionery in the modern sense. Apricots have a short season and mebos extends it by months, which is why the Cape's fruit growing districts produced it in quantity long before sugar was cheap. South Africans still carry it on hikes and long drives for exactly the reason it was made: it keeps, it needs no refrigeration, and a small piece goes a long way. The word is also applied loosely to other dried fruit sweets, which is a modern imprecision rather than the original meaning.

South AfricaNympha

Agege Bread

Agege bread is named for a suburb of Lagos, and the naming is the whole story: a bread so associated with one district that the district's name became the product. It is soft, pillowy, slightly sweet, and it pulls apart in strands rather than tearing cleanly, which is the texture Lagosians recognise before they taste anything. It is street food infrastructure. Agege bread is sold from bread hawkers' trays and roadside stands across Lagos and far beyond it, and its most characteristic use is the simplest one: torn and dipped into stew, particularly the pepper stews sold at the same roadside. It is also split around fried egg, sardines, butter or beans, and eaten walking. The bread has become a piece of Lagos shorthand, standing in for a whole way of eating in the city, and for many Nigerians abroad it is the specific bread they mean when they say they miss bread from home. That reputation has produced a persistent confusion with Jamaican hardo bread, which it resembles in shape and softness. Agege bread is Nigerian, from Lagos, and named for the place that made it.

Nigeria2 hr 20 minDebby

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

Kilishi, Northern Nigerian spiced dried beef coated in a groundnut and pepper paste

Killishi (Beef Jerky)

Kilishi is Northern Nigerian dried meat, and it is a considerably more deliberate thing than the jerky it is usually compared to. Beef is sliced thin enough to be translucent, dried, coated in a paste built on ground groundnuts and spices, dried again, and briefly finished over heat. The groundnut coating is what separates kilishi from every other dried meat in the world. It is a preservation technology first. In the Sahel, where refrigeration was not available and the dry season is long, thin slicing and sun drying kept meat edible for months, and the spice paste added flavour while doing further preservation work. That the result is now sold as a delicacy rather than as survival food does not change what it was built for. Kilishi is Hausa, sold in markets across the north and increasingly across the whole of Nigeria and among the diaspora, where it travels well precisely because it was designed to. It is eaten as a snack rather than as part of a meal, torn into pieces, often with a cold drink. The heat level varies by maker, and the yaji spice logic that runs through northern Nigerian cooking, the same groundnut and pepper base used on suya, is visible in it.

Nigeria5 hr 35 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

Tarb, Egyptian kofta wrapped in lamb caul fat and grilled until golden

Tarb (Grilled Kofta Wrapped in Lamb Fat)

Tarb is kofta wrapped in caul fat and grilled, and the caul is what the dish is named for. Tarb is the Egyptian word for the lacy membrane of fat that surrounds a lamb's stomach, and wrapping seasoned minced lamb in it produces something that ordinary kofta cannot: the fat renders during cooking, bastes the meat from the outside in, and crisps to a golden shell. Its occasion is Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, and the connection is direct rather than customary. Eid al-Adha involves the slaughter of an animal and the distribution of its meat, and caul fat is one of the parts that becomes available when a whole lamb is broken down at home. A dish built on caul is a dish that belongs to the moment when a whole animal is being used, which is why tarb appears then and rarely otherwise. Kofta itself runs across Egypt and the whole Middle East, minced meat with onion, parsley and spices, formed and grilled. Tarb is the version that takes it somewhere richer, and Egyptians treat it as a heavy dish for a family celebration rather than everyday food. It is found in the grilled meat restaurants that specialise in kofta, kebab and grilled chicken across Egypt, served with rice or pasta.

Egypt1 hr 55 minBlessing

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

Moukhbaza, a Sudanese dish of mashed ripe banana topped with dried hot chilli

Moukhbaza (Mashed Banana Paste)

Moukhbaza is mashed ripe banana with dried hot chilli, and the combination is the entire point. Sweet and hot together is a pairing Sudanese cooking returns to repeatedly, and moukhbaza is its most concentrated expression: nothing but banana, lemon juice and toasted chilli, with no attempt to soften the contrast between them. The source places it in eastern Sudan. It is worth being straightforward that closely related dishes under the same name are documented in Yemen, on the other side of the Red Sea, where mukhbaza is a well established banana and chilli preparation. Eastern Sudan faces Yemen directly across that water, and the Red Sea has carried food, people and language in both directions for a very long time. Which side of it the dish began on is not something the available record settles. Dried chilli is used across Sudanese cooking for range rather than simply for heat, and here it is toasted first, which deepens it and takes the raw edge off. Moukhbaza is served as a side or a relish rather than as a course, spread and eaten with bread, and a presentation version stuffs the mashed banana back into a halved and baked banana pepper.

SudanNympha

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

Ndambé

Ndambé is a Senegalese black eyed pea stew, and its most recognisable form is not a bowl at all. It is loaded into a split baguette and eaten as a sandwich from a roadside stand, which is what most Senegalese picture when the word comes up. The baguette is a colonial inheritance that Senegal has thoroughly made its own. French bread arrived with colonial administration and is now baked and eaten across the country in quantities that have nothing to do with France, and the ndambé sandwich is one of the clearest examples of what happened to it: a West African bean stew, spiced with chilli and thickened with tomato, packed into a European loaf and sold for very little money. It is breakfast and dinner food rather than lunch, and Senegalese describe it as winter food, which in Senegal means the cooler months rather than anything a European would call winter. Sweet potato goes in in some households, and meat, usually beef or lamb, in others, though the stew is entirely good without either. Beyond the sandwich it is served with rice, couscous or on its own.

SenegalBlessing

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

Akod

Akod is a tripe dish and it is the emblematic dish of Tunisian Jewish cooking. Beef tripe and a cow's trotter are cleaned, blanched through several changes of water, then cooked for hours with garlic, cumin, tomato paste and harissa until the sauce is thick and the tripe has surrendered completely. Its place is at the kemia, the Tunisian Jewish spread of small dishes that opens a meal, alongside banatages, briks, fricassés and minina. A host laying out a proper kemia would be expected to have made it. Tunisian Jewish cooking developed over centuries in Tunisia and has since largely relocated to France and Israel with the community, which makes recording dishes like this more urgent than recording better travelled ones. The wider family is large and worth knowing. Moroccan douara, also called t'qualia or kercha, uses mutton tripe. Algerian bakbouka includes carrots, courgette and chickpeas. Chkamba in Oran and chmenka in Tunisia are seasoned differently again, and the Moroccan Jewish version, tajine al guezar, meaning the butcher's pot, uses cumin and paprika without tomato paste and is cooked for close to ten hours over coals at Pesach. Offal has fallen out of favour with younger generations across the region, which the source for this recipe notes with some regret.

Tunisia6 hr 30 minBlessing

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

South African chicken pie with a golden puff pastry lid, filled with chicken, ham and egg in a sago thickened sauce

Chicken Pie (Traditional South African Style)

South African chicken pie is distinguished from every other chicken pie in the world by one ingredient: sago. The pearls of tapioca are soaked and cooked into the sauce, where they turn translucent and give the filling a texture that is moist and slightly gelatinous without being wet. No other pie tradition does this, and South Africans who grew up with it can identify its absence immediately. The spicing is the other marker. Nutmeg and cloves in a savoury chicken filling reads as unusual to most palates and is entirely standard here, reflecting the Cape spice traditions that run through South African cooking. Lemon juice cuts it, and thyme and rosemary sit underneath. The source for this recipe is firm that the nutmeg and clove are non negotiable. It is festive food and family food. Chicken pie appears at Christmas, at Sunday lunches and at the potluck gatherings where South Africans bring a dish, and it is served hot rather than cold. Ham is scattered through the filling and slices of hard cooked egg are tucked in, which gives the cut pie its pink and yellow flecks against the white chicken. Yellow rice, roast potatoes, green beans and a tomato salad are the conventional accompaniments.

South AfricaFoodChef

Garantita

Garantita is a baked chickpea flour flan, sliced and eaten hot in a piece of baguette with cumin and harissa. It is Algerian street food in the most literal sense: sold from carts and small counters, cheap enough to be a default lunch, and eaten standing up. Its names change across the country. Garantita in Algiers, calentica in Oran, and karantita, karen or el hami in the west. In Algiers it also goes by el kebda el beida, the white liver, and it is described without embarrassment as the poor man's sandwich, which is a statement about price rather than quality. The origin story is a good one and should be treated as a story. It is said to come from Spanish soldiers at the fort of Santa Cruz in Oran in the 18th century, who ran out of provisions and had only chickpea flour, water and oil left, and whose cook combined them. The name is then traced to the Spanish caliente, meaning hot. The connection to Spanish chickpea cooking is real, since similar chickpea flour preparations exist across the western Mediterranean, but the specific tale of the soldiers is folklore rather than record. One rule is not negotiable: garantita is eaten hot, never cold.

AlgeriaBlessing

Meat Pie

The Nigerian meat pie is a hand pie with a short, slightly flaky crust around minced beef, potato and carrot in a thick gravy. It is not the same thing as a British meat pie or a Jamaican patty, though it is related to both, and Nigerians will tell you the difference immediately: the pastry is denser and less sweet than a patty, and the filling is chunkier and more heavily seasoned than a British one. It is everywhere. Meat pies are sold from bakeries, from glass warmers in petrol stations, from hawkers at bus stops, and at every party alongside puff puff, chin chin and spring rolls on the small chops platter. They are eaten as breakfast, as brunch, as a snack, and with a soft drink or chilled juice. The pastry is where it is won or lost. The ratio of fat to flour is treated as a rule rather than a guideline in Nigerian kitchens: half the weight of the flour in margarine, and getting that ratio wrong is the single most common reason a home made meat pie comes out hard. The other is oven heat, which has to be watched rather than trusted, since ovens differ and an overbaked pie is dry.

Nigeria1 hr 5 minBeatrice

African Fish Roll

The fish roll is a West African street snack: a simple enriched dough wrapped around seasoned flaked fish and deep fried until crisp. It is eaten across Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana, sold from bakeries, roadside stands and glass warmers, and it sits on the small chops platter alongside meat pie, puff puff and spring rolls. Its name shifts with its shape. Rolled into a cylinder it is a fish roll; made in the manner of a folded half moon pie it is called a fish pie. The two are the same idea and Nigerians and Ghanaians use both terms. The source for this recipe gives Cameroonians the credit for making them best, which is the kind of claim that gets argued about rather than settled. Mackerel is the standard fish, called titus in Nigeria after a brand name that became the general term for the frozen fish sold across the country. It is steamed, boned, flaked and seasoned with onion, spring onion and cayenne, which is a short ingredient list doing a lot of work. The dough is where the technique sits: too much handling gives a hard roll rather than a crisp one, which the source identifies as the usual failure. Baking is possible and gives a lighter, less crisp result.

1 hr 30 minDebby

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

Recettes

Recettes à la une

Somali Doughnuts (Kac Kac)

Nigerian Buns

Tarb (Grilled Kofta Wrapped in Lamb Fat)

Agege Bread

Gullisuwa

Dombolo (Dumplings or Steamed Bread)

Potjiekos (Afrikaans Stew on the Fire)

Plats emblématiques

Recettes les plus populaires

Dombolo (Dumplings or Steamed Bread)

Potjiekos (Afrikaans Stew on the Fire)

No Corn Starch Rice Cakes (Ablo)

Madeeda Hilba (Sudani Fenugreek Porridge)

Homemade Chicken Mayo Pies

Tapalapa

Rwandan Banana Beignets

Mebos

Agege Bread

Gullisuwa

Killishi (Beef Jerky)

Simple Pasta Salad Recipe (With Video)

Tarb (Grilled Kofta Wrapped in Lamb Fat)

Nigerian Buns

Moukhbaza (Mashed Banana Paste)

Fluffy Pancakes

Nigerian Egg Roll

Ivorian Jollof Rice

Somali Doughnuts (Kac Kac)

Milo Cake

Liver Suya (Liver Kebab)

West African Banana Fritters (Klako, Krakro)

Alkubus

Ndambé

Egyptian Kofta

Akod

Benne Cakes

Chicken Pie (Traditional South African Style)

Garantita

Meat Pie

African Fish Roll

Catfish and Carrot Sauce

Mhajab - A Traditional North African Dish

Attiéké Steak Alloco

Chocolate Malva Pudding

Kisra