West Africa
Spicy Foods Make West Africans Cooler
Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo; these are the countries of West Africa. Unlike North Africa, these countries absorbed surprisingly little from their European settlers. The biggest international culinary exchange for the West African nations unfortunately came about because of the slave trade.
Anyone who has grown up in the southern United States has had, probably without knowing it, dishes whose heritage begins in Africa.
Similarly, the ships that sailed to Africa brought with them some of the indigenous crops of the Americas. Together, these factors helped create today’s African diet.
Background
The Arabs were an early influence on the African continent. Decades before Christ’s birth, African kingdoms traded their own slaves, gold and ivory for the Arabs’ spices, herbs and salt. In the course of events, the Islamic religion gained new followers. Cinnamon, cloves, mint and cilantro arrived in Africa from their Arab partners, and these flavorings continue to be used most widely in North Africa.
The Portuguese, French and British did have some influence in regional cuisines, but not as much as one might expect. More deeply entrenched are the indigenous ingredients and the ones sent back from the slave trade ships of the Americas. The Gambian products of rice, peanuts, yams and black-eyed peas have become cash crops of the United States’ southern states.
The ships that brought these ingredients returned to Africa bearing foods of the New World and the Caribbean: okra, coconuts, plantains, chile peppers, green beans. Portuguese explorers brought other items from Europe’s cache: citrus, tomato, corn and pineapple, many of which also originated in the Americas.
What to Eat
A typical meal in West Africa is heavy on starchy foods, light on meat, generous on fat and commonly cooked in one pot. Other than that, the most telling characteristic of an African dish is heat: chile peppers are used beyond what we would begin to think of as hot. The most notorious peppers, the Scotch Bonnets and the pilli pilli, earn respect from even the most dedicated chile-heads. Equatorial climates all tend to encourage the use of chiles, as these hot foods produce the effect of “gustatory sweating”—distinguished from other types of bodily perspiration and resulting in an overall cooling effect.
West African cuisine bears more seafood than the rest of the continent, and unlike most other cultures, mixes seafood and meats together in many dishes. Most dishes are some form of stew, allowing for the stringy, poorer quality lamb and goats to be used, and chickens and eggs are commonly served throughout Africa.
Peanuts can be found in just about anything, from soups and stews to garnishes, snacks and pounded into a paste. West Africa is blessed with rain, resulting in rice as the predominant starchy food, while corn, millet and sorghum dishes are featured on the rest of the continent.
Along with rice, yams, sweet potatoes, cassava and potatoes and root vegetables fill the bellies of the people, as do plantains. All can be cooked in multiple ways: roasted, baked, boiled, mashed, with cinnamon, or sugar or oil or in a range of both sweet and savory dishes.
Menu Guide
Tatale—plantain cake
Foofoo—mashed yam and plantain pudding
Joloff rice—spicy chicken and rice
Calaloo—seafood, vegetable and rice dish, perhaps a precurser to jambalaya
Bangku—cornmeal dumplings
Efo—Nigerian spinach soup
Groundnut Stew—peanut stew with chicken (peanuts are called groundnuts)
Kelewele—deep-fried, seasoned plantain slices
Ata—Nigerian word for “hot” also name of a sauce
Yassa au poulet—West African chicken marinated in lemon, chiles and garlic
“Gumbo” in the US refers to a type of stew with okra as a main ingredient. Interestingly, it comes from the West African word “gombo” which means okra, a plant native to Africa and which arrived on US shores because of the slave trade.
