Recettes

Liberian Jollof Rice

Jollof rice belongs to the whole of West Africa, and every country that claims it claims it as its own. The Liberian version sits inside that family without being anyone's copy. It is a tomato rice, built on long grain parboiled grains, sweetened by onion and sweet pepper, sharpened with garlic and ginger, and carrying a smokiness that Liberian cooks treat as the mark of a pot done properly. Rice is the centre of the Liberian diet rather than an accompaniment to it, and a one pot rice that can be built around whatever protein a household has, or around no protein at all, earns its place in an everyday kitchen as readily as at a gathering. It feeds a room from a single vessel, which is part of why it survives. Across West Africa the jollof pot is argued over with genuine feeling, and the loudest of those arguments runs between Nigeria and Ghana. Liberia is rarely named in that particular fight. That says less about the quality of the Liberian pot than about who is holding the microphone.

Liberia1 hr 20 minLaila

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

Benachin

Benachin is the Gambian one pot rice, and the name is the plainest description of the method anyone has managed: in Wolof it means one pot. Rice, meat and vegetables go into a single vessel and come out as a single dish, which is both a technique and an argument about how food should be shared. It belongs to the Senegambian rice tradition that gave West Africa jollof, and Gambians are direct about the relationship. Benachin is not a version of jollof rice; jollof rice is what happened to the Senegambian rice pot as it travelled east. The Gambian and Senegalese coast is where that tradition sits, and thieboudienne is its closest relative. What distinguishes benachin from the tomato rice dishes further along the coast is the vegetables. Cabbage, aubergine, carrot and bell pepper are cooked in the same pot as the meat, lifted out while the rice takes up the liquid they flavoured, and returned on top at the table. The dish arrives layered rather than mixed, and it is served from the centre for everyone at the table to eat from.

The Gambia50 minAmara

Mufete

Mufete is a plate from Luanda, and more precisely from Ilha de Luanda, the sandbar that curves off the Angolan capital. It is grilled fish with an onion salsa, set alongside beans in palm oil, plantain, sweet potato and cassava, and it is assembled on a shared platter rather than plated per person. It is weekend food. Angolans eat mufete at lunch or at a late brunch, and the scale of it is the point: the full version, with the beans and all three starches, is understood to require the rest of the day to sit with. There is a lighter version, fish and onion salsa alone, for those who intend to do something afterwards. Mufete has moved from occasion to routine within living memory. It was served at parties, weddings and celebrations, and it is now eaten regularly, particularly by islanders, in Luanda itself. That shift from ceremonial food to weekend food is the kind of movement that usually goes the other way, and it has kept the dish present in the city rather than preserved in it.

Angola3 hr 20 minNympha

Boeber, a Cape Malay sweet milk drink from South Africa, served warm with slivered almonds

Boeber (Cape Malay Sweet Milk Drink)

Boeber is a Cape Malay sweet milk drink, thick with vermicelli and sago and scented with cardamom, cinnamon and rose water. It sits somewhere between a drink and a pudding, and Cape Town households do not find the ambiguity a problem. Its place in the calendar is precise. Boeber is served on the fifteenth night of Ramadan, marking the midpoint of the fast for those who have completed the first fifteen days. That single fixed date gives it a weight that a dish eaten year round does not carry: it belongs to a moment, and its appearance signals that the moment has arrived. The drink comes from the Cape Malay community, whose ancestors were brought to the Cape from Indonesia, India and East Africa, and boeber carries the marks of all three. It has close relatives across that map. Malaysians break the fast with bubur lambuk, a porridge; Trinidadian households serve sawine at Eid al-Fitr; kheer and payasam on the Indian subcontinent are its nearest kin, most likely carried to the Cape by enslaved and later indentured Indians. In South Africa itself, the Afrikaans melkkos is the comparable dish. Boeber is what all of those became in one place.

South Africa55 minJennifer

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

Mogodu, a South African tripe dish, served hot with pap

Tripe (Mogodu)

Mogodu is the South African name for tripe, and it is among the most strongly felt dishes in the country's food. South Africans do not hold moderate opinions about mogodu. It has people who would eat it every day and people who will not have it in the house, and both positions are held with conviction. Tripe is the stomach lining of a ruminant, most often beef, and it belongs to the category of cuts that were once cheap because they were unwanted. That history is part of what the dish carries. Offal in South Africa was for a long time what was left over, and the communities it was left to made it into something with a claim on the national table rather than a mark of going without. It is winter food for many households, cooked slowly over hours until the chew softens without disappearing entirely. The texture is the reason for both the devotion and the refusal, and it is not something a cook can engineer away. Mogodu is eaten with pap, and the pairing is not negotiable: the neutral maize takes the place that bread would take elsewhere, against a dish whose flavour comes mostly from long contact with what it was cooked in.

South Africa3 hr 15 minAmara

Banku, a Ghanaian fermented corn and cassava dish, shaped into balls and served with grilled tilapia and pepper sauce

Easy and Simple Way to Make Banku

Banku is fermented corn and cassava dough, cooked to a smooth, slightly sour mass and shaped into balls. The sourness is the whole identity of the dish. Unfermented, the same ingredients produce something else entirely, which is why the two to five days the dough spends fermenting are not a preliminary to making banku but the making of it. The name is Ga-Dangme, and banku belongs most closely to the Ewe, Fante and Ga-Adangbe peoples of southern Ghana, though it is eaten throughout the country. Its most recognised pairing is with grilled tilapia and hot pepper sauce, a combination that functions as a national plate: the sour dough against the freshwater fish and the raw heat of the pepper. It is eaten with the hands, in pieces pinched off the ball and used to lift soup or sauce. Ghanaians distinguish banku from akple, its close Ewe relative, and from fufu, which is a different preparation entirely, and those distinctions matter to the people who make them. Fermentation is what sets banku apart from the other starches on the same table.

Ghana2 daysJennifer

Isombe

Isombe is pounded cassava leaves cooked down with groundnuts, palm oil and aromatics into a dense green stew. It is a Rwandan household staple, and the version most cooks make carries a meaty depth that has nothing to do with meat: the groundnuts and the long cook supply it. The dish belongs to a wider Great Lakes tradition. It is documented as originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo and travelling south into Burundi and Rwanda, and the three countries cook recognisably the same dish under names that shift with the language. Cassava leaves are the constant. They are pounded rather than chopped, which breaks down the fibre in a way a knife cannot, and that texture is what distinguishes isombe from any other leaf stew. Isombe is served with rice or beans, and in Rwanda commonly with ubugari. It is everyday food rather than occasion food, which is the harder thing for a dish to be: it has to be worth cooking on a Tuesday. Cassava leaves are grown, gathered and sold across the region, and the greens that make isombe come from the same plant that provides the starch on the other side of the plate.

Rwanda2 hr 20 minBlessing

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

Edo Black Soup

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

Nigeria40 minTaiwo Oladapo

Garden Egg Stew, a Ghanaian stew ground in an earthenware bowl and served with boiled yam and avocado

Garden Egg Stew (Earthenware Bowl Method)

Garden eggs are the small white and pale green African aubergines that give this stew its name and its body. They are firmer and more bitter than the large purple aubergine, and when they are cooked soft and ground down they produce a thick, faintly bitter base that no other vegetable substitutes for. This is the earthenware bowl version, and the bowl is not incidental. The pepper, onion, roasted tomato and cooked garden eggs are ground directly in an asanka, the ridged clay bowl used across Ghana, which crushes rather than purees and leaves a coarse, uneven texture. A blender produces a different dish. The other common preparation fries the components instead, and Ghanaian cooks treat the two as separate recipes rather than as variations. The stew is most closely associated with the Akan of Ghana, and its usual partners on the plate are yam or plantain. Koobi, salted and cured fish, is what supplies the savoury weight, alongside smoked mackerel and herring, and palm oil finishes it. Egg and avocado go on top. It is a dish assembled at the table as much as made at the stove.

Ghana50 minAmanda Dadson

Pork Trotters

Pork trotters are the foot and ankle of the pig, and almost all of what they offer is collagen. Cooked for hours they break down into something gelatinous and rich that thickens its own liquid, and they are eaten both as a full meal with gravy and as something picked at with the fingers. In South Africa the trotter carries a specific history. Trotters, like offal, were what was left over, the parts of the animal that commercial butchery and the households that could afford choice cuts did not want. They were what was available to people who had been made poor by law. The black community took the trotter and made it a dish with its own standing rather than a marker of scarcity, and that transformation is what the dish now carries. It is claimed rather than merely eaten. It is served with pap, the maize porridge that takes up the gravy, and it appears at home meals and at gatherings without being reserved for either. The long cook is unavoidable, which makes it food for a day when you are in the house anyway.

South Africa3 hr 35 minTshego Stone

Pap En Vleis

Pap en vleis is Afrikaans for porridge and meat, and the name describes the whole of it. Maize meal cooked to a smooth, firm mass, and grilled meat beside it. Two components, no sauce required, and a dish that the entire country recognises regardless of which language its household speaks. Its natural setting is outdoors and social. Pap en vleis is what comes off a braai and what is served at a shisanyama, the grill and gathering place where meat is bought, cooked over open fire and eaten on site. The dish exists in the same space as the fire and the people standing around it, and eating it indoors at a table is possible but slightly beside the point. Maize is the foundation of the South African diet, and pap is its most direct expression: nothing added, nothing disguised, judged entirely on texture. The meat is whatever the household or the grill has, and its variability is why the dish has stayed universal rather than becoming the property of any one community. A dish defined by two nouns leaves room for everyone's version.

South Africa55 minLaila

Nigerian Fisherman Soup

Fisherman soup belongs to Akwa Ibom and Cross River, the two Nigerian states where rivers run through the towns and villages and seafood is not an occasional purchase but the ordinary contents of the pot. Among the Efik it is called efere ndek iyak, and it is indigenous to them rather than adopted. What defines it is the range of what goes in. Fresh fish, prawns, snail, periwinkle, stockfish and dried fish appear together rather than in sequence, and the soup is a record of a single catch rather than a recipe with a fixed ingredient list. Periwinkle in particular, the small river snail sold in its shell across the south-south, is the ingredient outsiders notice and locals take for granted. The thickener is what makes the Efik version specific: pounded yam is added to the pot in lumps and dissolves into the broth, giving body without any flour or seed. Cocoyam does the same job in households that prefer it, and each thickener leaves its own trace on the taste. Every fishing culture in the world has arrived at a soup like this. This one is the version the Niger Delta arrived at.

Nigeria1 hr 5 minDebby

Kontomire Stew

Kontomire is the Twi word for cocoyam leaves, and kontomire stew is the dish that has made them Ghana's most eaten green. The leaves are broad and thick, closer to collard greens in body than to spinach, and they hold their structure through a long cook rather than collapsing. The stew belongs to Akan cooking and forms one half of ampesi, the pairing of a stew with yam, plantain or cocoyam that is among the most common meals in southern Ghana. It exists in more than one form. Abom, the Asante version, is steamed cocoyam leaves ground with onion, pepper and tomato and finished with palm oil. The version here is tomato based and thickened with ground melon seeds, which Ghanaians call egusi or agushie, and which give it a body and a nuttiness that abom does not have. Kontomire stew sits inside the wider West African family of leaf stews known collectively as palava sauce, cooked in Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria with the greens each country has. Ghana's is distinguished by the cocoyam leaf and by the melon seed.

Ghana50 minJennifer

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

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

Kizaca

Kizaca, also written kizaka or quizaca, is pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly with groundnuts until the leaves soften and the nuts break down into a thick, savoury sauce around them. It is among the most widely eaten dishes in Angola and one of the few that is vegetarian by default. Its composition tells a compressed version of Angolan history. Cassava is not indigenous to Angola; it arrived from Brazil, another Portuguese colony, and became so completely established that its leaves are now a national green. Palm oil, groundnuts and slow cooking are the local contribution. Angolan food is often described as Portuguese influence over African ingredients, and kizaca shows the arrangement is more complicated than that: the central ingredient is an import that has been African for centuries. It is normally eaten as an accompaniment to meat or fish rather than as the centre of a plate, and kizaka com peixe, made with fish, onions and tomato, is the most common form in Angola. Rice or chikuanga goes alongside. Angolan cooks make it in advance deliberately, because the flavour of cassava leaf and groundnut needs several hours together before it settles.

AngolaNympha

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

Kenkey

Kenkey is fermented maize dough, wrapped in banana leaf or corn husk and steamed into firm parcels. It is sour, and the sourness is the whole character of it. The fermentation runs one to three days before anything is cooked, and a kenkey that has been rushed is immediately identifiable to anyone who eats it regularly. It comes from the Ga people of Accra and the surrounding coast, who have been making it for centuries, and it has spread across Ghana without losing that origin. Ga kenkey and Fante kenkey are recognised as distinct: the wrapping differs, and so does the ratio of fermented to fresh dough, which changes how sour the finished parcel is. Kenkey is street food in the most functional sense. It is bought in its wrapping, which serves as the plate, and eaten with fried fish, shito and a raw pepper and tomato grind, standing up or sitting on a bench. The wrapping is not presentation; it is what the dough is steamed in and what keeps it for days without refrigeration. That combination of sour dough, hot pepper and fried fish is one of the most recognisable plates in West Africa.

Ghana55 minLaila

Umqombothi

Umqombothi is Xhosa beer, brewed from maize meal, maize malt and sorghum malt. It is thick, cloudy, sour smelling and low in alcohol, usually under three per cent, and it is not made to be compared with lager. It is a different category of drink with a different purpose. Its purpose is ceremonial before it is social. In Xhosa practice umqombothi is brewed for the return of the abakwetha, the young men coming back from ulwaluko, the initiation and circumcision rite. It is central when families communicate with the amadlozi, the ancestors, and it appears at traditional weddings, funerals and imbizo, the community meetings where matters are decided. A gathering of consequence has umqombothi at it, and its absence would be noticed as a statement. The drink is not confined to South Africa. Sorghum beer is brewed across the continent under many names: dolo in Burkina Faso, pito in Nigeria, ingwebu among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe, which is their word for froth. Brewing is done outdoors over an open fire, cooled at ambient temperature, and the recipes are held within families and passed down rather than written.

South Africa3 days 1 hrJennifer

Peppered snail, a spicy Nigerian finger food of African giant snails in a scotch bonnet pepper sauce

Peppered Snail: Spicy Nigerian Finger Food

Peppered snail is party food in Nigeria. It arrives on a plate with cocktail sticks, it is eaten standing up with a drink in the other hand, and it belongs to celebrations, family gatherings, weekend events and the kind of occasion where people are moving between conversations rather than sitting down to a meal. The snails are African giant land snails, considerably larger than the garden snails eaten in Europe, and their texture is the whole point: firm, dense and chewy, closer to a scallop or a squid than to anything on a butcher's counter. They carry almost no flavour of their own, which is why they can take the heat they are given. The pepper sauce, built on scotch bonnet, onion, garlic and bell pepper, is what you actually taste, and the snail is what carries it. Snail is expensive in Nigeria relative to most proteins, which contributes to its place at events rather than at weekday meals. It is a dish that signals the occasion is worth something, and that association is as much a part of why it is served as the taste is.

Nigeria55 minDebby

Creamy Samp

Samp is dried maize kernels, stamped to crack the hulls and break the grain into coarse pieces. It is eaten in place of rice or mealie meal across South Africa, and it holds a chewy, distinctly grainy texture that neither of those has. Different communities cook it differently: with beans as umngqusho, on its own with a little seasoning, or with meat worked through it. Its defining property used to be time. Conventional samp takes about three hours, which puts it beyond a weekday for most households and placed it firmly at weddings, traditional ceremonies and funerals. There is a South African joke that turns on exactly this: warn someone about risky behaviour and the reply is that everyone will eat samp at the funeral, because that was the reliable place to find it on a menu. Quick cook samp changed that. Processed to cook in around thirty minutes, it moved the dish from the occasion to the ordinary week, and the reason it caught on is as much about electricity as about time. Three hours on a stove is expensive in a country with an unreliable supply. This creamy version, finished with mushroom, cheese and milk, is what samp looks like once it stopped being ceremonial.

South Africa1 hr 10 minTshego Stone

Palmnut soup, known in Ghana as abenkwan, a rich orange soup of palm fruit pulp with fish and meat, served with fufu

Palmnut Soup (Abenkwan)

Abenkwan is the Akan name for palmnut soup, and the Akan of Ghana have been producing and eating it for generations. It is built on palm cream, the thick pulp pressed from the fruit of the oil palm, which gives the soup its deep orange colour, its weight and a rich, faintly smoky flavour that no other ingredient produces. The palm fruit is what makes it. Palm oil runs through Ghanaian and West African cooking generally, but abenkwan uses the whole fruit pulp rather than the extracted oil, which is a different ingredient with a different result: less greasy, more substantial, and carrying a fruitiness the oil alone does not have. Smoked and dried fish, marinated meats and aromatics go into that base, and the soup is eaten with fufu, omo tuo, banku, fonio or rice. Palmnut soup is not exclusive to Ghana, and the region cooks it under several names. It is common in Côte d'Ivoire. In Nigeria's Niger Delta, banga soup is the same palm fruit base handled differently, most closely associated with the Urhobo and finished with beletete leaf and a distinct spice mix. Each country's version is recognisably from the same fruit and unmistakably its own.

Ghana1 hr 20 minFoodChef

Egusi Soup

Egusi soup is eaten across every region of Nigeria, every ethnic group and every economic class, which is a claim very few dishes anywhere can support. Its name changes with the language and the dish does not: miyan gushi in Hausa, ofe egusi in Igbo, efo elegusi in Yoruba. Its defining ingredient is ground egusi, the dried seed of a gourd related to the watermelon, milled to a meal that thickens and enriches the soup around it. The seeds are ground dry, without water, until the powder turns to a paste under the blade. Nothing else produces the particular nutty, faintly bitter depth that egusi gives, which is why the soup is named for the seed rather than for the meat or the greens that also go into it. There is no single method. The caking approach lets the ground seed set into soft curds in the stock; the frying approach starts the egusi in palm oil; the moulding approach forms it into balls that are eaten like meat. Ijebu cooks in Ogun State make it with no vegetables at all. Every one of these is egusi soup, and Nigerians will argue for their own without seriously disputing anyone else's. It is eaten with pounded yam, fufu, eba, amala or any swallow at hand.

Nigeria50 minFoodChef

Awara, a Northern Nigerian fried soy bean cake, served hot with pepper and sliced vegetables

How to Make Awara (Tofu, Soyabean Cake)

Awara is Northern Nigerian soy bean cake, and it is one of the clearest examples of an introduced crop becoming a genuinely local food. Soy beans are not indigenous to West Africa. Awara, as the Hausa make and eat it, is not found anywhere the crop came from. What separates awara from tofu is the frying. The process to the curd stage is the same: beans are soaked, ground, strained to a milk, heated, and set with an acid or a mineral coagulant, then pressed. Where East Asian tofu is usually finished at the press, awara is cut, seasoned and fried until the outside is golden and firm. That frying step is the dish, and it produces something with a texture and a flavour of its own. It is street food and snack food, sold ready made across the north because the process at home is long. Awara is served hot with ground pepper and oil, and increasingly with sliced fresh pepper, cabbage and cucumber alongside. It is eaten with pap or kunu at breakfast, and at any hour after that. It is also the north's most practical answer for anyone eating no meat, which is a role it has held far longer than the word vegetarian has been in common use in Nigeria.

Nigeria1 hr 30 minJennifer

Buka stew, a Nigerian pepper stew with assorted meats cooked in bleached palm oil

Buka Stew With Assorted Meats (Obe Ata)

Buka stew is the pepper stew of western Nigeria, named for the places that made it famous. A buka is a small, cheap local eating house, and the buka is where working Lagos eats: fresh food, several dishes, no cooking at home, and no pretensions about any of it. The stew belongs to those kitchens and carries their signature. It is a pepper stew rather than a tomato stew, and the distinction is the whole recipe: tatashe and rodo dominate and tomato is kept back, which is the reverse of the everyday Nigerian stew ratio. The palm oil is bleached first, heated until it changes character, and that step produces the specific aroma that makes a buka identifiable from the street. Seasoning is kept minimal on purpose, because the peppers and the oil are doing the work. It is made with assorted meats, the cow parts that a household kitchen might skip and a buka never does, deep fried before they go into the pot. The women who run these kitchens are known collectively in Nigerian speech as Iya Basira, a name that stands in for all of them, and mama put is what the roadside version is called. Buka stew is eaten with white rice, beans, yam, fried plantain or agege bread.

Nigeria50 minJennifer

Tuwon dawa, a Northern Nigerian guinea corn swallow, served with miyan kuka baobab leaf soup

Tuwon Dawa Da Miyan Kuka Recipe

Tuwon dawa is guinea corn swallow, and its pairing with miyan kuka is one of the fixed combinations of Northern Nigerian eating. The tuwo is stiff, plain and pale; the soup is dark green, drawing and sharply flavoured. Neither is eaten without something like the other. Guinea corn is sorghum, and sorghum is the older grain of the Sahel. It was the staple of Northern Nigeria long before maize arrived from across the Atlantic, and it holds ground in the north that maize has taken elsewhere on the continent because it tolerates the heat and the short rains better. Tuwon dawa is what that grain becomes on a plate: milled, stirred into boiling water and worked to a smooth firm mass. The word tuwo covers a family rather than a single dish. Tuwon dawa is the guinea corn version, tuwon masara the maize one, tuwon shinkafa the rice one, and Hausa households distinguish between them by texture and by which soup they suit. Miyan kuka, made from ground baobab leaf, is the partner most associated with the guinea corn version, and the two together are among the most recognisable plates in the north.

NigeriaAmara

Danwake, Northern Nigerian bean and baobab leaf dumplings tossed with oil, pepper and fresh vegetables

Danwake Assorted

Danwake is a Northern Nigerian dish of small dumplings made from bean flour and ground baobab leaf, then cooled and dressed with oil and pepper. The dumplings are pale green from the kuka, soft and slightly springy, and they are eaten in quantity rather than as a delicate portion. Its origin is given as Niger, and it has been adopted so completely across Northern Nigeria that it now reads as a staple of the region rather than an import from it. The flour blend varies from one part of the north to another, which means there is no single correct danwake and households treat the mix as something to have an opinion about. Traditionally it is eaten as danwake da mai da yaji, which is Hausa for danwake with oil and pepper, and that is the whole dish in its plain form. The eating method is part of the memory people carry of it: children pick up a single ball with a broomstick, swirl it in the oil and pepper, and eat it that way, one at a time. A fork is the modern substitute and is more hygienic, which is not the same as saying it is better. The assorted version here carries egg, tomato, onion and bell pepper alongside the base.

Nigeria45 minMaryam

Nsala soup, an Igbo white soup from eastern Nigeria made without palm oil and thickened with pounded yam

Nsala Soup (White Soup)

Ofe nsala is called white soup for a reason that will be obvious to anyone who knows Nigerian cooking: it contains no palm oil. Almost every soup of the Nigerian south is built on palm oil, and its absence here is not a simplification but the defining decision. What is left is a clear, pale, intensely aromatic broth in which every other ingredient has nowhere to hide. It belongs to the Igbo of eastern Nigeria and is particularly associated with Anambra State. Catfish is the traditional protein, and the pairing of fresh river fish with a clean broth is the point of the dish, though goat meat, old chicken and smoked turkey are all used. Its aromatic character comes from uziza seed, ehuru, ogiri and utazi leaf, the last of which is bitter and used in deliberately small quantities. The thickener is pounded yam, added to the broth in small amounts and dissolved. This is what gives nsala its body without any oil or seed, and it is the same technique used in fisherman soup further south. Nsala has a particular place in Igbo households as a soup made for new mothers and for people recovering, which is a role that follows from its lightness rather than being asserted on top of it.

Nigeria1 hr 47 minFoodChef

Muamba de galinha, an Angolan chicken stew cooked in red palm oil with okra and squash

Muamba De Galinha (Angolan Chicken Stew)

Muamba de galinha is the dish most often named as Angola's national one, and it earns the title by being the clearest single statement of what Angolan cooking is. Chicken marinated in garlic and paprika, seared in red palm oil, simmered with onion, tomato and hot pepper, thickened with okra and given body by squash. The palm oil is not a background ingredient. It is what turns the stew the deep orange that muamba is recognised by, and it carries a specific flavour that no other fat provides. Angolans call it dendem or red oil, and a muamba made with anything else is a chicken stew rather than a muamba. The name itself points somewhere older. Muamba refers to a family of dishes built on palm across Angola and the wider Congo basin, of which muamba de galinha is the chicken version and muamba de ginguba the groundnut one. The Portuguese in the name is only the galinha. It is eaten with funge, the cassava porridge, or with rice, and the version here serves it with cassava tossed in lemon and garlic, which is a contemporary treatment of a very old accompaniment.

Angola45 minChef.donkey

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