“This book is a delight. The dilemma is, do I read the fascinating text, cook the delicious recipes or get lost in the stunning photographs?” Prue Leith, OBE, chef and author “There is an intriguing, exquisitely crafted blend of distinctly African aromas and unforgettable, magical culinary experiences.” Prof Charles van Onselen, University of Pretoria Research Professor, Faculty of Humanities. “Africa finally takes its place in world cuisine with this wonderful, evocative book. Through it we see the rich complexity of African food cultures, the tastes of long histories and dynamism of new culinary practices.” Prof M A Vaughan, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, Cambridge University. To order "To the Banqueting House", email Gwynne Conlyn the author by

Introduction

This book is an unashamed culinary love letter dedicated to the fine flavours of Africa, and the African Diaspora.

Our continent is home to some spectacularly expressive but largely overlooked food traditions. In the pages that follow we will dish up African gastronomic expressions of small private pleasures and grand public occasions. You will taste love, comfort, simplicity, grandeur, survival and celebration as they are expressed in African cooking pots.

This is neither a travel book nor an anthropological tome, rather it is a celebration of taste sensations written by chefs for those who love to cook and eat. Our focus is on flavours. We invite you to partake in a feast of African cuisine, but in order to enter the banqueting house it is necessary to define what we mean by African cuisine.

When we say Mediterranean cuisine it is generally understood that we mean the shared elements that are fundamental to the diverse food genres of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, the notion of Asian cuisine is not foreign to world gastronomic citizens. And yet there is a widespread erroneous assumption that African cuisine is an oxymoron.

The flavours found in the cooking pots of Africa are as deliciously diverse as the people who stir them but, despite the differences, there are many commonalities of ingredients, methods of food preparation and food culture. From the cinnamon and honey-infused tagines of Morocco to the fenugreek and paprika berberé piquancy of the Ethiopian wat pot and the ginger and peanut opulence of a Ghanaian kegenou pot, there are shared traits. From the floral flavours of a Congolese kwanga cassava bread steamed in a forest leaf liboke to the aromatic dried fruit sweetness found inside an Afrikaner springbok potjie pot, there are more similarities than there are differences.

In this book we have sought out an African cuisine by identifying clusters of core ingredients, culinary techniques and attitudes to food that are fundamental to the diverse cooking styles found in Africa and the African Diaspora. In each of the eight chapters that follow we focus on a key ingredient and explore the areas of culinary convergence and divergence.

The history of our continent is marked by waves of international out migration which have left traces of Africa in global cooking pots. In the caruru of Brazil, the gumbo pots of the USA, the kiirai vendakkai of South India and the boza beers of Iraq there are unmistakable African elements.

There is also a history of migration into our continent that has created several Asian and European Diaspora in Africa, with vibrant African influenced food cultures. In the chapters that follow we trace our food genres over time and terroir (the total natural environment of food growing areas) in order to identify a modern African culinary identity.

Previous Pan African cookbooks have repeated well-known classic recipes. The photographs and text in such books tend to describe their use in traditional, rural settings. There is a dearth of cookbooks depicting original, modern culinary interpretations. We have taken care not to stereotype Africans as belonging only to an impoverished peasant environment. While this is true for many people, it is important to us that Africans with urban lifestyles and eating habits are also acknowledged. The statistician in Addis Ababa, the poet in Accra, the factory worker in Nairobi and the nurse in Thamaga are as African as a goatherd in the Sous Valley.

Internationally urban people are resource-rich and time-poor. We have included traditional recipes but we have also used modern adaptations and developed new culinary creations. Our recipes are designed to acknowledge that while we all have extended families and special occasions where traditional techniques and recipes are essential, many African lives are now characterized by labour-saving devises, limited time and nuclear families. The cooking styles of such people can be copied by others living in similar situations worldwide.

Many previous African cookbooks have presented the food of extreme poverty, dispossession and demoralization as though it represents the only culinary genre in Africa. While we acknowledge that many African children go to sleep hungry, many others do not. We therefore owe it to all African children to recognise the heights of their cultural and culinary past, present and future. Not to do so is the equivalent of presenting European food on the basis of people eating tulip bulb soup during the World War II Dutch famine.

We do not intend to deny poverty in Africa or the history that created it, but we want to examine what constitutes richness and challenge the prevailing assumption that taking pleasure in flavour is the preserve of the materially wealthy. Flavour complexity collapses only in conditions of extreme duress. Such a collapse is seldom permanent. Much of the food that appears in modern European restaurants has its origins on the tables of the poor. The pesto and polenta of Italian peasants were first created and consumed by the poor and yet they are modern restaurant standards.

Furthermore, terroir rather than monetary value often plays the key role in determining flavour. There is an opulence in the food of West and East Africa that relates to the proliferation of seafood, coconuts, plantains and cashews that has very little to do with material wealth. Mozambicans regard the Mchuzi wa Biringani aubergine curry as the staple that got them through the meatless impoverished years of the War of Independence and the subsequent civil war. However, to an outsider, this dish is so abundant in its creamy coconut texture that in our recipe we would advise that you serve it with a tart tomato salad in order to break the potentially over powering richness. For vegetarians, the food of East Africa is a revelation in the self-indulgent heights of pleasure that European cuisine generally achieves through meat. East African vegetarian flavours rival foie gras for startling decadent intensity.

The ancient Roman scholar Pliny the Elder said, “Ex Africa simper aliquid novi” (out of Africa there is always something new). In our book we have tried to ensure that the discussion of ancient and traditional cultures does not eclipse the role of Africans as modern global citizens and the place of innovation within our food genre. Resistance to the notion of innovation in African cuisine comes from both Africans and non-Africans alike. There are Sowetans who will criticize us because our chakalaka recipe is “not how my mother made it”. There are Parisians who find the idea of glamorous, opulent African cuisine offensive while there is poverty on our continent. Both attitudes apply special treatment to the food of our continent which simultaneously romanticizes, patronises and potentially stultifies a vibrant art form. Internationally, food traditions are never static, rather they respond to societal change. From the Loire Valley to the city streets of Bangkok great world food genres have molded themselves to fit into contemporary lifestyles. So it should be with African food forms.

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In recent years there have been some admirable American cookbooks on the subject of the global migration of African cuisine. Writers such as Cherie Hamilton, Diane Spivey and Jessica Harris have looked at African themes in the cuisine of the Americas, but culinary modernisation in Africa itself has been largely ignored. Those looking for roots are by definition interested in the past. Americans have a tendency to romanticize Africa in a manner that is helpful for the African American sense of identity but ultimately unhelpful for Africans in Africa. While it is important to recognize the glories of the great West African kingdoms from Djenne to Timbuktu and also the horrors of colonial exploitation, there is a danger that this traps modern West Africans in a world of what might have been. Anyone who makes our recipe for gratinated Assigni crab, packed with the classic West African flavour combination of coconut milk, palm-nut oil, seafood and ginger will realize that while we incorporate our history, the future is deliciously ours to determine.

We have deliberately maintained a very inclusive concept of African gastronomic identity. We gloried in the beauty of indigenous African ingredients, techniques and chefs but we have also marveled at the creative use of non indigenous ingredients in an African setting. The culinary endurance and adaptability of the flavour repertoires of exiled Spanish Sephardic Jews in Algeria, Malay slaves at the Cape and Indian indentured labourers in Uganda is as delicious as it is remarkable. We recognise Ethiopian restaurants in 21st Century New York, Moroccan restaurants in Tel Aviv, Congolese restaurants in Johannesburg as valid reflections of an international African food genre.

When looking at similarities between the food of Africa and that of the African Diaspora we have tried to recognise the role of trans-Atlantic slavery in creating Afro American food genres, but also to look past the horrors of the Middle Passage and see the culinary influence of the pilgrims, traders, explorers, conquerors and slaves who journeyed into Europe, the Middle East and the Arab world.

While research on Africa’s ‘other Diasporas’ is limited, we have tried to include recipes that show the African influences on modern food worldwide. Despite our best efforts, the culinary effects of many of these earlier African travels into Asia are obscured by their greater antiquity and by their having occurred in pre-literate societies. The food of our Diaspora in the Americas is better researched because of 20th Century political movements amongst African Americans in the USA that have focused on roots to a much greater extent than those in Asia and the Middle East. In the absence of written evidence we have looked for patterns and flavour trends that link distant communities to Africa. We acknowledge that some of our associations may be tenuous and that similar terroirs can produce similar culinary traditions even without social and genetic ties.

We have taken core ingredients and examined historical and psychological themes that have brought us to the modern African recipes in each chapter. In doing so, we have drawn on conventional historical sources and also myths, religious texts, ceremony and poetry. We have traced the epic journeys of African ingredients, flavours, textures and techniques in and out of countries, over continents, through diverse terroirs and time periods. We have traversed the gastronomic peaks and valleys of royal courts, street markets, restaurants and domestic kitchens. Our quest has taken us from the saffron and sweetmeats of 12th Century Mogadishu, to the Cap Classique and umngqusho of President Nelson Mandela’s Inauguration Dinner in 1994, and beyond. However epic the history, we have ultimately brought all the recipes presented in our book into their modern context. We aim to be participants not observers in the food of our continent and our Diaspora as it exists today.

While we acknowledge that myth cannot and should not be presented as historical fact, we find that there is merit in presenting myth as a marker of psychological truth.

African American folk law recounts that the cultivation of okra in Louisiana originated from seeds smuggled into the country hidden in the hair of a slave woman. Whether or not an African culinary heroine actually crossed the Atlantic ocean with contraband seeds in her hair is irrelevant. What matters is that the story speaks of the emotional importance to African Americans, of retaining their African gastronomic origins in very difficult circumstances. Similarly, it matters not that it is impossible for the Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) African nanny to have cooked him cassava curry. What matters is that East African Muslims tell the story and it illustrates their attachment to this dish. When myths have survived into the modern culinary repertoire we have used them to illustrate the emotional significance of certain foods to the people who cook them.

The food presented in this book has an immediacy of taste that will speak to modern palates worldwide. We hope that you will open the pages and immediately want to cook the recipes. We want you to use the recipes for quick snacks as well as special occasions. If you do, we know that your efforts will be rewarded, because from ayeb cheese to izidombolo every mouthful is like eating the sun.

Unless otherwise specified, all recipes serve six.

NOTE 1: We are chefs, not plant taxonomists and we have adopted the ‘if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck’ approach to ingredient classification. The chapters are divided by core ingredients and we have used terms in common parlance rather than botanical use to group ingredients. Hence cashews, palm-nuts and peanuts are not technically nuts but they are in the nut chapter. Cacao beans and vanilla pods are placed with beans and peas despite their tenuous botanical claim to such a position.

NOTE 2: We are chefs, not historians. We have not put footnotes in the text of our document because we thought it would disrupt the flow of the food. At the back of the book you will find a list of books that can be used to study the food history of Africa in a more academic fashion.

NOTE 3: We hope that the reader will cook extensively from this book. The measurements and method descriptions are given in a manner that is as clear as possible. Where possible, solid ingredients are weighed. Volume measurements are provided for spices (despite their status as a solid) because in small quantities they are difficult to weigh with a domestic scale (for example, 2.5ml powdered cumin will not register on a household scale). All liquid ingredients are given in fluid units. Ingredients are listed in both metric and US measurements. Detailed procedures for standard techniques are not given in the text; rather, they are explained in the glossary at the back of the book.

NOTE 4: For those ingredients that are difficult to find outside Africa, internationally available alternatives have been suggested. Hence while inkomazi might be difficult to purchase outside southern Africa, buttermilk can be bought worldwide. Similarly, Melugeta pepper is hard to find outside of Brazil but its replacement – cardamom - is always obtainable.

NOTE 5: We think that we have collected recipes that represent a good spread of regional cuisines throughout Africa. We are aware that there are more recipes from coastal regions than from those countries without sea borders. In part this reflects the vibrant culinary cultures that are often found in port cities. However, to the extent that this under-represents the food of inland people we apologize and hope to rectify this limitation in subsequent work.