Recettes

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

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

Matapa, a Mozambican dish of cassava leaves cooked with groundnuts, coconut milk and shrimp, served with rice

Mozambique Matapa Recipe

Matapa is Mozambique's cassava leaf dish, and it is where the country's two food geographies meet. Cassava leaves and groundnuts belong to the interior; coconut milk and dried shrimp belong to the Indian Ocean coast. Matapa puts all four in one pot, and the result tastes like nowhere else on the continent. It is most common in the south of the country, where the ingredients are close at hand and inexpensive, and it is everyday food rather than occasion food. Mozambican households eat it with rice or bread. The dish is also known as matata in some accounts, and the naming shifts across regions in the way that dishes carried by many communities usually do. The cassava leaves are what make it. They are finely chopped and cooked long enough to lose their fibre and their raw edge, and the groundnuts thicken the coconut milk around them into something dense and savoury. Cooks substitute spinach, kale, collard greens or pumpkin leaves where cassava leaves are hard to come by, and every Mozambican will tell you the substitution is not the same dish.

Mozambique1 hrDebby

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

Papaya smoothie in a glass, blended with banana, yogurt and chia seeds

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.

10 minDebby

Crispy fried chicken feet, deep fried to golden brown and served as a snack

How to Make Crispy Fried Chicken Feet

Chicken feet carry almost no meat. What they carry is skin, tendon and collagen, and that is precisely the reason they are eaten: cooked properly they deliver a texture that no other part of the bird provides, gelatinous underneath and crisp on the surface. They belong to the category of cuts that are eaten wherever nothing is wasted, which covers a large share of the world. Across West and Southern Africa, in the Caribbean, across East and Southeast Asia, chicken feet are street food and bar food, cheap, communal, and eaten with the hands. In much of the global north they are treated as waste and rendered for stock, which is a recent and geographically narrow position rather than a normal one. Eating them has its own protocol. The foot is held in the fingers, and the toes are bitten off one at a time between the joints, with the bones and nails discarded. That is not fussiness; it is the only way to get at what is edible. The result is food that takes time to eat and is therefore sociable, which is most of what a bar snack is for.

35 minDebby

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

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

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

Banana Soup

Bananas and their cooking relatives are among the most important foods in Africa's Great Lakes region and across its humid tropical belt. In Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eastern DR Congo and parts of Tanzania and Kenya, the plant is a staple rather than a fruit: green cooking bananas are steamed, mashed, worked into stews and eaten daily, and the sweet ripe banana is only one use among many. That distinction between cooking banana and ripe fruit matters for placing this recipe. It uses ripe bananas, blended smooth with coconut milk and finished with curry powder and turmeric, which puts it closer to the spiced coconut cooking of the Swahili coast than to the green banana dishes of the interior. The pairing of coconut milk with warm spice is genuinely East African coastal; the blended sweet banana base is not a documented preparation from any specific tradition. This is best understood as a contemporary dish rather than an inherited one. It uses African ingredients and an East African coastal flavour logic, but no country, community or lineage can honestly be attached to it on the evidence available. What it does well is show what ripe banana does under savoury treatment, which is a legitimate thing for a recipe to do without claiming a heritage it does not have.

50 minLaila

Pap and sous, South African maize porridge served with a tomato and onion gravy

Pap & Sous

Pap and sous is maize porridge with tomato gravy, and between them they account for a very large share of what is eaten in South Africa on an ordinary day. Pap is the smooth, firm maize meal that anchors the plate. Sous, Afrikaans for sauce, is the tomato and onion gravy that goes over it. The comparison South Africans reach for when explaining pap to outsiders is grits or polenta, and it holds up as far as the grain goes. What it misses is the position the dish occupies. Pap is not a side. It is the centre of the plate, and everything else is arranged in relation to it, which is why the quality of a household's pap is noticed and remarked on. The gravy is where the cook is visible. A sous is built from onion, pepper, chilli, garlic and tomato with paprika and a little sugar and vinegar, and every household has a version. Pap and sous is eaten on its own as a complete meal and served alongside grilled meat and boerewors when there is a fire going, which is the same dish playing two different roles depending on the day.

South Africa1 hrChef.donkey

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

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

Kafteji

Kafteji is Tunisian street food built on a single idea: fry a range of vegetables separately so each one is properly cooked, then chop them together and serve the result with bread. Potato, courgette, pepper, tomato and aubergine are the usual cast, and the chopping at the end is what makes it kafteji rather than a plate of fried vegetables. It is sold from small counters and casse-croûte shops across Tunisia and eaten at any hour, most often stuffed into bread as a sandwich. It is inexpensive, which is part of its identity: kafteji is what you eat when you want something substantial and hot without a restaurant. Fried egg is a common addition, and in many Tunisian versions it is the only protein. The version here includes ground beef or lamb, which puts it at one end of a range. Kafteji is frequently made entirely without meat, and the vegetable only preparation is at least as common in Tunisia as the meat version. Harissa, olives and a squeeze of lemon are the usual finishing touches, and the dish is eaten from a shared plate with bread as the utensil.

Tunisia50 minLaila

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

Hausa Masa

Masa, also called waina, is a fermented rice cake from the Hausa of Northern Nigeria: small, round, spongy underneath and browned on the surface, cooked in a dedicated pan with shallow round wells. It belongs to the Hausa, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, and it is among the dishes most closely identified with them. The fermentation is what makes it. Rice is soaked, ground with cooked rice, and left to rise overnight, and the mild sourness that develops is what separates masa from any other rice pancake. The holes that open across the surface as it cooks are the visible evidence of that ferment, and a masa without them has not been left long enough. It is breakfast food and snack food, sold from street stands and in markets across the north, and it appears at celebrations and family gatherings. What goes with it varies by household and by time of day: honey, groundnut oil, a peppery stew, or yaji, the same spice blend used on suya. Masa is a dish that has held its association with one people while spreading well beyond them, which is a fair description of how Hausa food generally has travelled through Nigeria.

Nigeria1 hrLaila

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

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

Rwandan brochettes, goat meat skewers grilled over charcoal and served with plantain and salad

Rwandan Brochettes (Grilled Meat Skewers)

Brochettes are skewered grilled meat, and in Rwanda they are the food most reliably present wherever people gather in the evening. Goat is the usual choice, threaded onto skewers with onion, grilled over charcoal, and eaten standing at a bar, sitting in a restaurant, or bought from a street vendor on the way somewhere else. The word is French, meaning skewer, and its presence in Rwandan usage is a plain marker of the colonial period. What the word describes is entirely Rwandan: a particular cut, a particular char, and a particular way of eating, with grilled or fried plantain, potatoes and a fresh salad alongside. They are not heavily spiced, which distinguishes them sharply from the grilled meat traditions further west. Where Nigerian suya is built on a dry spice coating and West African peppered goat is aggressively hot, a Rwandan brochette is seasoned simply and relies on the meat and the fire. Heat, when it is wanted, arrives separately at the table as akabanga, the thin orange Rwandan chilli oil that is sold in small bottles and used a drop at a time. That separation of meat and heat is a matter of preference in Rwanda rather than an absence of one.

Rwanda55 minDebby

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

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

Placali

Placali is fermented cassava paste, cooked to a smooth elastic mass and eaten with soup. It is one of the principal swallows of Côte d'Ivoire, and it is also eaten in Togo, where it is known as agbelima koumè. The fermentation is what separates it from the many other cassava preparations of the region. Cassava is grated, crushed and left for two days before any cooking, and the acidity that develops gives placali a distinct sourness that plain cassava fufu does not have. The texture is looser and stickier than pounded fufu, and it is deliberately kept that way: the amount of water left in before cooking decides how soft the finished placali will be, and Ivorian cooks adjust it to preference. Cassava reached West Africa from South America through Portuguese Atlantic trade, and Côte d'Ivoire has built an unusually large part of its food on it. Attiéké, the fermented cassava couscous, gari and tapioca all come from the same root, and placali sits alongside them as the swallow form. It is eaten with palm nut soup, okra sauce or kpala, and the pairing with a rich palm based soup is the one most associated with it.

Côte d'Ivoire50 minAnthonyJ

Boerewors Stew

Boerewors is South African sausage, and the name is Afrikaans: boer for farmer, wors for sausage. It is coarsely minced beef, sometimes with pork or lamb, seasoned with toasted coriander seed, black pepper, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, and it is made in one continuous coil rather than in links. Its identity is protected in law. South African regulation sets out what may be sold as boerewors, including a minimum meat content and a cap on other ingredients, which is an unusual level of legislative attention for a sausage and a fair measure of how seriously the country takes it. That regulation is also why boerewors is genuinely hard to buy outside South Africa and why South Africans abroad end up making their own. The sausage belongs to the braai above all, grilled in its coil over coals. This stew is what happens to it indoors: cut into pieces, browned, and simmered with tomato, garlic and spices into something closer to a weeknight dish. Boerewors is also eaten with pap and a tomato and onion sauce, which is the standard plate across the country. The stew is a newer treatment of an old sausage, and its spread beyond South Africa has come with the diaspora.

South Africa30 minNympha

Miyan kuka, a Northern Nigerian baobab leaf soup, dark green and thick, served with tuwon shinkafa

Miyan Kuka (Baobab Leaves Soup)

Miyan kuka is Hausa soup made from powdered baobab leaves, and it is the one Northern Nigerian dish that people warn you about before they serve it. It is dark green, mucilaginous and thick, and it does not look like anything anyone finds appetising on first sight. Northerners are entirely aware of this and serve it anyway, because the taste is not in dispute even where the appearance is. Kuka is the dried and ground leaf of the baobab, sold as a dark green powder in markets across the north and instantly recognisable to anyone who has shopped there. The powder is whisked into a seasoned stock at the very end of cooking, which is where the soup gets both its body and its drawing texture. It is also called luru. Nigeria's soups map closely onto its peoples, and miyan kuka is the north's entry in that map: Yoruba households have ewedu, Igbo have ofe ugba, Edo have bitter leaf soup, the riverine south has fisherman soup. Miyan kuka is eaten with tuwon shinkafa, tuwon dawa or any swallow, and it is one of the dishes that is genuinely better on the second day, which is a claim its cooks make readily and which holds up.

Nigeria30 minBeatrice

Nigerian pancakes, thin savoury sweet pancakes made with onion and pepper in the batter

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.

Nigeria30 minJennifer

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

Amala

Amala is the swallow of the Yoruba southwest, and it is the darkest thing on a Nigerian table. Yam is peeled, cut, dried and milled into a flour called elubo, and the drying turns the white tuber brown. In boiling water that brown becomes near black, which is the colour amala is known by and which surprises people who expect a starch to be pale. Its home is Oyo State, and Ibadan in particular. The pairing of amala with ewedu, the jute leaf soup, is treated in Ibadan as something close to a civic institution, and the same seriousness attaches to it in Lagos, where you will not find a buka without it on the menu. Yoruba speakers make the comparison directly: amala and ewedu stand to an Ibadan person as akpu and ofe onugbu stand to an Igbo one. Three flours make three amala. Elubo isu, from yam, is the standard and gives the dark version. Lafun, from cassava, gives a white amala and is a different dish in practice. Elubo ogede, from unripe plantain, is lighter in colour and lower in starch. The technique is unforgiving in one specific way: the flour must go into water that has been taken off the heat, or it lumps, and lumps in amala are the fastest way to ruin it.

Nigeria20 minBeatrice

White amala with ilasa soup, a Yoruba pairing of cassava flour swallow and okra leaf soup

Preparation of White Amala and Ilasa Soup

White amala and ilasa soup is a Yoruba pairing from southwestern Nigeria, and both halves of it are local specialities rather than national staples. The amala is white because it is made from cassava flour, known as lafun, rather than the dried yam flour that gives the more familiar dark amala its colour. Ilasa is okra leaf soup, and it is the more particular of the two. It is made from the leaves of the okra plant rather than the pods, whisked with a cooking broom until the soup draws into a light green mass with a texture close to ewedu. Ground melon seed goes in first to give it body. Ilasa is closely associated with Igbo-Ora in Oyo State, where it is a town speciality, and it is far less widely eaten than ewedu or okra pod soup even within Yorubaland. That local specificity is the point of the dish. Nigeria's food is often described nationally, and the reality underneath it is that towns and even quarters hold their own preparations. A visitor to Igbo-Ora would be served ilasa; a visitor to Ibadan would be served ewedu. Both are Yoruba, both are eaten with amala, and neither substitutes for the other.

Nigeria1 hrTaiwo Oladapo

A South African kota, a quarter loaf of bread filled with chips, russian sausage, cheese and atchar

Classic South African Kota

A kota is a quarter loaf of bread, hollowed out and packed with fried food. The word is township English for quarter, and that is the whole description: bread cut in four, the soft centre pulled out, and the cavity filled with chips, polony, russians, viennas, cheese, egg, atchar and sauce, then capped with the bread that was removed. It belongs to the townships of Gauteng, where it is sold from small takeaway windows and eaten in the hand without a plate. Kota shops compete on what they will fit into a quarter loaf, and the size of the fill is a large part of the reputation. It is cheap, it is a complete meal, and it is built for people who need to eat between one thing and the next. Atchar is what makes it South African rather than generically stuffed bread. The pickled green mango relish, oily and sour and hot, came to South Africa through Indian indenture and cuts the fried starch that dominates everything else in the cavity. Kota is often described as a version of bunny chow, and the two are related without being the same: bunny chow is Durban Indian, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, and kota is a Gauteng township form filled with fried items. They share an ancestor and are not interchangeable.

South Africa40 minTshego Stone

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

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