Recipes

African Mango and Cucumber Salad

This is an East African salad of mango, cucumber and tomato with chilli, cumin and a little cinnamon, dressed with lime and finished with roasted peanuts. It is served on its own or alongside grilled meat, and its appeal is the contrast: crunchy against soft, sweet against tart. Mangoes are not indigenous to Africa. They reached the East African coast through Persian traders around the tenth century, part of the same Indian Ocean exchange that brought rice, spices and coconut into Swahili cooking, and they have been grown and eaten there ever since. Kenya and Tanzania are now substantial producers. The seasoning is what places it. Cumin with a dash of cinnamon in a fruit salad is a Swahili coast combination rather than a Western one, reflecting the same trade history, and the peanuts and lime give it the texture and acidity that hold the whole thing together. Salting the cucumber and onion first and letting them drain for twenty minutes is the technique that matters most: cucumber holds a great deal of water, and skipping it leaves a salad sitting in liquid within minutes of being dressed.

★★★★★Highest Rated

25 minEasyKenya

Recipe by Amara · Africook

Fruit Salad

Fruit salad is chopped fruit served in its own juices, sometimes with a light syrup or dressing, and it is about as universal as food gets. The one technique worth knowing is that it improves with time. Fruit cut and left to sit releases juice, and that juice becomes the dressing, which is why a fruit salad made an hour ahead is noticeably better than one assembled at the last minute. The source makes exactly this point: it is tastier the longer it soaks. The other thing worth knowing is which fruits misbehave. Apples, pears and bananas brown quickly once cut; a squeeze of citrus slows it considerably. Melon releases a lot of water and dilutes everything else, so it is better added late. Berries collapse if stirred much. A dressing is optional. Honey with lime, orange juice, or a light sugar syrup are all common, and any of them draws out more juice from the fruit itself. **Filed as Worldwide.** Fruit salad has no particular national claim, and the page is kept and reclassified rather than removed.

5 minEasy

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

Smoked Vegetables

Vegetables tossed in oil and smoked paprika and cooked low and slow in a barbecue smoker for one to two hours. Like smoked shrimp, this belongs to American barbecue rather than to any African tradition, and no country is named in the source. Which vegetables work is the useful part. Dense, firm vegetables hold up to the long, low process: potatoes, carrots, beets, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, onions, mushrooms, aubergine and winter squash such as butternut. Softer ones collapse before they take on any smoke. The recipe here uses courgette, yellow squash, onion, bell peppers, asparagus and carrots, which is at the softer end of that range and accordingly needs the shorter end of the time. Smoked paprika in the seasoning is doing something worth noticing: it brings smoke flavour independently of the smoker, which means the dish reads smoky even before the wood does its work. That is a useful trick in itself, and it means a version of this can be made in an oven with no smoker at all. Africa's charred vegetable traditions are different things entirely, Moroccan zaalouk, Egyptian baba ganoush, West African roasted pepper bases, where vegetables are blackened directly over flame rather than smoked slowly.

1 hr 45 minEasy

Recipe by Debby · Africook

Salatu Niebe (Senegalese Black-Eyed Pea Salad)

Salatu niebe is cooked black-eyed peas tossed with finely diced cucumber, tomato, bell pepper, spring onion and chilli, dressed with lime juice and olive oil. It is Senegalese and is usually served after the main meal rather than before it. Niebe is the Wolof word for black-eyed peas, and the bean is not an import. Cowpeas were domesticated in West Africa thousands of years ago and travelled to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, which is why black-eyed peas are as fundamental to Southern American cooking as they are to Senegalese. The direction of that journey is frequently reversed in the telling. The technique is in the cutting. Everything except the peas is diced very finely, so each spoonful carries a bit of everything rather than separate components. That is what makes it read as a composed salad rather than beans with vegetables in. It travels and keeps well, which is why it is a standard dish for feeding a crowd, made ahead, it improves as the peas absorb the lime and oil. The source credits Chef Pierre Thiam with popularising it outside Senegal, and that attribution is well founded. Its ingredient list omits the olive oil and parsley that its own description requires.

50 minEasySenegal

Recipe by Blessing · Africook