Recettes

Thiakry Couscous

Thiakry is millet couscous stirred into sweetened yogurt and milk, served cold, and it is one of the most widely eaten sweet things in Senegal and the Gambia. It is also written thiakri, chakery, caakiri and degue, and the spelling shifts with the language and the writer while the dish stays the same. Millet is the reason it exists. It is one of the principal grains of Senegal, grown across the drier interior where rice does not do well, and thiakry is among the most common things made from it. The grain is milled to a couscous and steamed, then cooled and folded into the dairy. In Dakar it is sold in every grocery store, which is a fair measure of how ordinary a food it is. It is eaten at breakfast as readily as at the end of a meal, which puts it in the same category as yogurt everywhere: sweet, cold, and not confined to dessert. Raisins, mango, grated coconut and chopped almonds are all standard on top, and vanilla and nutmeg are the usual flavourings. Its close relation ngalakh, made with peanut paste and baobab, is the elaborated festival version of the same base. Thiakry is the everyday one.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

15 minEasySenegal · Ivoirian

Recette de Cuisine228 · Africook

Nigerian Pancake (Diet)

The Nigerian pancake, known colloquially as diet, is thin, dense and slightly crisp at the edges, and it is savoury as often as it is sweet. Onion and ground pepper go into the batter alongside the sugar, which produces something no other pancake tradition attempts: sweet, savoury and faintly hot in the same mouthful. It sits a long way from the thick fluffy pancake of the American breakfast table. There is no raising agent and no attempt at height. The batter is loose, the pan is tilted to spread it thin, and the result has a dense bite and a lacy edge. Nigerians eat it at breakfast with tea, and just as readily as an afternoon snack with a cold drink. What it is served with follows the same double logic as the batter. Honey, sugar, condensed milk, peanut butter and fresh fruit on the sweet side; pap, custard, oats and yogurt drinks such as kunu aya or zobo alongside. It is home food and street food at once, cheap to make from things most Nigerian kitchens already hold, and it belongs to no particular region of the country, which is unusual enough to be worth noting.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Jennifer · Africook

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.

30 minEasyNigeria · African

Recette de Debby · Africook

Papaya Smoothie for Weight Loss

Papaya, known as pawpaw across most of anglophone West and East Africa, grows in nearly every tropical African country and in a great many household compounds. It is not a market luxury. A pawpaw tree fruits within a year of planting and keeps fruiting, which is why it turns up at the edge of yards from Lagos to Mombasa and why the fruit is understood as something you have rather than something you buy. Ripe pawpaw is eaten fresh and cold, most often at breakfast, cut into halves or wedges with a squeeze of lime. The lime is not decoration; it sharpens a fruit whose sweetness is soft and slightly musky and which can read as flat without acid. That pairing is the reference point this drink is built on. This particular recipe is a contemporary blended drink rather than a dish with a documented lineage. It belongs to the global category of fruit smoothies made for a health purpose, and it uses pawpaw as its base because pawpaw blends to an unusually smooth, thick texture without any thickener at all. The fruit is African by cultivation and by everyday use rather than by origin.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

10 minEasy

Recette de Debby · Africook