West African food & drink

This formerly unsung cuisine is finally getting the recognition it deserves across the world, and the people who make it are getting a fairer deal.

Grind peanuts until you have a peanut butter – and then let it sit. Leave it for a day or two, until the peanut oil has risen to the top. Scoop this away, until you’re left with peanut solids. These you can roll into long batons. If you like, you can join the ends of the batons to form rings.

Fry them in oil until they’re crispy, and you have made klouikloui – a beautiful Beninese biscuit.

Or, take peanut butter and turn it into a big bowl of Ghanian peanut soup, a ball of fufu (pounded cassava) sunken into the centre of it.

You can take that fufu and serve it with egusi soup, a dish made from ground melon seeds. Congratulations, you’re enjoying a Nigerian household favourite, and a protein-rich superfood.

West African food is complex, exciting, and often a labour of love. Techniques have been passed down in kitchens and cooking spaces, traditionally from grandmothers and mothers to daughters and granddaughters. Many dishes are created from involved, often labour-intensive processes which until relatively recently weren’t written down.

With West African food getting more recognition, and a rise of investment in cities like Lagos and Accra leading to high-end restaurant openings, chefs are now desperate to steal grandmother’s recipes.

The processes of making these dishes are best shown, rather than told. Like the skilful scaling of a palm tree to tap its cut flowers for wine; or the intensive process of pounding cassava to make fufu; the beauty with which jollof rice turns from a stew into a pan of glossy, orange, stew-filled grains; or the transformation of bitter beans into chocolate. To fully appreciate the cuisine, you need to see it being made.

At Kuapa Kokoo, an organisation of cocoa famers in Kumasi, Ghana, Cocoa fruit – papaya-shaped, sunshine-coloured, struck from the trees with a machete swipe, lies in piles on the plantation floor, ready for processing. Visitors can see it as part of our cultural holiday of Ghana, Togo and Benin. The farmers co-operative have the largest share of Divine Chocolate Ltd, a leading fair-trade chocolate company. Its farmers – 32 percent of them women – have benefitted from decades of development, including new daycare centres, schools, wells and boreholes.

“Perhaps the thing that will stick most vividly in my memory was the time spent at the fishing village of Kayar,” writes traveller Michael Segal, in his review of our holiday to Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. On the crowded shore of this coastal settlement, just up the coast from Dakar, the hand-painted pirogues of Senegalese fishermen create a logjam on the beach, around which throngs of fish sellers, caleches, shoppers and seagulls jostle. The frenzy of shore life is brought to higher intensity by the threats of overfishing and diminishing returns.

Peanuts, alongside fish, are Senegal’s main food export. Cocoa is Ghana’s. But behind the world’s best beloved ingredients, there’s a whole lot of West African ingredients that have grown under the radar.

There are staples like cowpeas, cassava and taro – the latter two are tubers that form a robust backbone to many households’ diets. Nigerian gardens are full of useful plants with medicinal uses, and nutritious stems, roots and fruits– such as fluted pumpkin, or vitamin-rich plants like bitter leaf and waterleaf.

There are spices likely unfamiliar to people beyond Africa, and hard to get outside of speciality shops. Take café touba – from Senegal – which is coffee flavoured with grains of Selim, a black-pepper-like spice, and cloves. Grains of Selim crop up in coffee, but also in marinades for suya – Nigerian meat skewers, in the hot, fried plantain sold as a street food snack, and, if you’re lucky, in ice cream.

Then there’s baobab fruit. Tourists may know the distinctive trees, but they don’t often know that powdered baobab, with its tamarind-sharp flavour, can be whipped into drinks, cocktails and ice lollies.

For more casual diners, there’s always West African fast food. And, in the absence of multinational corporations outside of major cities, you can celebrate thriving little roadside businesses.

Chop bar workers across Ghana (chop is patois for ‘eat’) spend their evenings making soups and fufu, ready to put out the next day for the lunch crowd. In Dakar’s informal restaurants, known as dibiteries, metre-long skewers strung with marinated meat are stacked on a grill over ashy coals, and turned with deft hands, to keep up with the demands of the city. In Lagos, it’s suya – barbecued, marinated meat – that draws the crowds.

West African cuisine isn’t on everyone’s radar just yet, but in these thronging, perennially popular establishments, it’s hard not to feel that you’re at the very centre of the culinary world.

Many West African countries have a variant of jollof rice, and engage in gentle rivalry about whose is better. It’s made by cooking rice in a beautiful tomato stew, until the liquid has been absorbed into the rice, and the rice is glossy, orange, and full of flavour. It takes patience and time – like all good things.

When unrefined palm oil is used in dishes, it gives a characteristic red sheen to ingredients. Red red is plantain and black-eyed peas in a stew, served in Ghana.

Made from cassava or taro, fufu is served with soup – and it’s the perfect vessel for eating soup with your hand. Maddeningly quick to eat, considering how long it takes to make.

UNESCO-protected, Senegal’s national dish is a lunchtime meal of broken rice and fish that is also served across Mauritania, Mali, Guinea Bissau and Guinea. But it was founded in St Louis, Senegal’s second city, among the fishing communities.

Originally conceived, the story goes, to keep Sufi chanters awake during the early hours, this coffee flavoured with grains of Selim and cloves hails from Senegal.

West Africa’s ubiquitous palm trees have long had many uses. One is that they can be tapped, and their resin used to create alcoholic palm wines – or distilled to create something stronger.