On really bad nights, I dream I’m with Shanda. The smell always comes first. Not the sickly sweet pungency of pus, like a designer cheese gone bad. No, it’s the rotting banana aroma that warns me. I twist around in my sheets, sweating, panting in the dark as the dream unrolls. ———————————— At dusk, we…
Category: Africa
What’s Cooking in Kenya? Ugali, Sukuma Wiki, and the Food of Barack Obama’s Father’s Childhood …
“When two locusts fight, it is always the crow who feasts.” Nigerian saying quoted in Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father An article in The Times of London stated that Barack Obama’s Kenyan family, members of the Luo group, to celebrate his presidential election victory, slaughtered four bulls, sixteen chickens, and a number of sheep…
They Called it Callaloo
Stuck off the beaten track, but surrounded by the heavy traffic of a congested city, the Grand Market in Virginia Beach, Virginia is not an easy one to pinpoint, even with GPS tracking technology. But “Sam’s” voice droned “Turn right, then left,” and somehow I managed to avoid the motorcycle on a kamikaze path to my…
A Juneteenth Commentary: Edna Lewis and the Myths Behind Southern Cooking
Powered by the mythology that has grown up around Southern food over the last several years, many voices claim ownership, hurling harsh accusations of cultural appropriation, and silencing and shaming contrary opinions. The argument is not easy to prove, as it remains hampered by a lack of statistics, contemporary documentation, and clear evidence of outright…
African Cuisines: Cookbooks for Exploration and Discovery of Superb Flavors
Only one of this year’s new releases in print cookbooks covers the cooking of Africa, unless you count books about Moroccan cooking by Fatéma Hal and Z. Guinaudeau, as well as Kittee Berns’s Teff Love: Adventures in Vegan Ethiopian Cooking. The rest only come in Kindle editions, a medium which is not my first choice…
Peanuts and the Cooking of West Africa
Writers throw out the words “African cooking” all the time. I know. I have written same words, to my great embarrassment. But stop and think about something for a moment. The term “African cooking” is just as ridiculous as calling the cooking of Europe “European cooking,” lumping together the cuisine of France with that of…
