Recettes

Easy Nigerian Fried Rice

Nigerian fried rice is party food, and it sits beside jollof rice on the table at every celebration where both appear. Where jollof is red and built on a cooked tomato and pepper base, fried rice is pale gold, coloured by curry powder rather than tomato, and studded with diced vegetables and liver. It is a Nigerian dish rather than a Chinese one, despite the shared name and the soy and oyster sauces that have entered the modern version. The rice is parboiled in seasoned meat stock so it takes flavour before it is ever fried, which is the opposite order to Chinese fried rice, and the vegetables go in raw at the end so they keep their bite and colour. Fried rice spice, sold as its own blend in Nigerian markets, is the thing to look for; curry powder is a different profile and contributors are firm on the point. Liver is the traditional protein and the part most often left out abroad. Fried until firm and diced small, it gives a mineral depth that nothing else in the dish supplies. Shrimp, chicken and beef all appear alongside or instead. It is served with fried plantain, moi moi, coleslaw and chicken, and at a Nigerian party it is served with jollof rather than instead of it.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

50 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Amako Blessing · Africook

African Salad (Abacha and Ugba)

African salad is the Igbo dish of abacha and ugba, and it is a salad only in the loosest sense. Abacha is cassava that has been cooked, shredded on a special grater, soaked overnight, rinsed and dried in the sun. Ugba is fermented oil bean seed, cooked for hours, sliced, rinsed and left to ferment. Neither is cooked when the dish is assembled. That is the striking thing about it: almost the entire preparation happens off the stove. Palm oil is turned into a thick yellow paste by working it with potash solution, and everything else is folded into that paste in sequence. The order matters, and Igbo cooks are firm about it, because the components will not distribute evenly if they all go in together. It belongs to ceremony. At an Igbo wedding, abacha is reserved for the important guests, and it is served with chilled palm wine, which is the pairing anyone from the region will name. Despite being filling enough to be a meal, it is treated as a snack rather than a main course. It can be served cold or warmed briefly, and the choice between the two is a matter of household preference rather than correctness.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

30 minMediumNigeria

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Caldo de Peixe (Cape Verdean Fish Soup)

Caldo de peixe is the Cape Verdean fish soup: white and sweet potatoes cooked with onions, peppers and tomatoes, with fish added towards the end. It is winter food on the islands and it is built entirely around what an Atlantic archipelago has to hand. Cape Verde sits several hundred miles off the coast of Senegal, and its cooking reflects that position exactly, Portuguese in structure and vocabulary, West African in ingredients, and shaped throughout by the fact that fish is abundant and almost everything else has to be grown on volcanic islands with limited rainfall. Sweet potato alongside white potato in the same pot is a very Cape Verdean move, and it gives the broth a background sweetness that plain potato would not. The soup is deliberately unfussy. There is no stock, no wine and very little seasoning beyond the vegetables themselves: the broth is made by the fish and the potatoes as they cook. That is characteristic of island cooking generally, and it means the quality of the fish matters more here than in a heavily seasoned soup. This recipe came into the archive through the Smithsonian's 1995 Festival of American Folklife cookbook, to which Cape Verdean Americans contributed recipes as part of preserving their heritage. That provenance is worth recording.

1 hr 5 minEasyCape Verde

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Bassi Salté (Senegalese Millet Couscous)

Bassi salté is Senegalese millet couscous served with a meat and vegetable sauce, studded with raisins, chickpeas and white beans. Its full name is thiéré bassi salté, and it is one of the most demanding dishes in the Senegalese repertoire. The grain is the point of difference. This is not wheat couscous but thiakry, made from millet, the ancestral West African cereal, cultivated in the Sahel for thousands of years before wheat or maize arrived. That matters both culturally and practically: millet couscous is naturally gluten-free, and it needs a binder, which is where lalo comes in. Lalo is powdered baobab leaf, and it holds the steamed grains together in a way that wheat gluten would do on its own. It is festival food. Bassi salté is traditionally eaten at Tamkharit, the Senegalese observance of Ashura, and the effort involved, steaming the couscous twice, building the sauce over hours, forming the diaga meatballs separately, is part of what makes it appropriate to the occasion. Its defining flavour is the balance between savoury and sweet. Raisins and sometimes dates go in alongside the mutton and root vegetables, which is deliberate rather than incidental. The source's ingredient list is badly scrambled and its sauce timing is not credible; both are flagged below.

2 hr 45 minHardSenegal

Recette de Blessing · Africook