African Cuisines & Recipes.

Fifty-four countries, thousands of languages, and no such thing as African food in the singular. The continent holds several of the world's major culinary systems, and they have less in common with each other than French cooking has with Greek. Across the Maghreb, food runs on preserved lemon, olive oil, cumin and coriander, with the tagine's slow closed-pot method and couscous steamed rather than boiled — Berber, Andalusian and Ottoman history layered into the same dish. West Africa builds on a base of tomato, onion and chile, with palm oil and ground peanuts for body: jollof rice, argued over between Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal with genuine feeling, egusi thickened with melon seed, and fermented cassava in a dozen forms. Ethiopia and the Horn stand apart entirely — spongy sour injera made from teff, spice mixtures like berbere and the spiced butter niter kibbeh, meals eaten communally with the hand, and a fasting tradition that produced one of the world's great vegan repertoires. Southern Africa cooks around fire and migration: the braai as a social institution, potjie stews, chakalaka, and Cape Malay dishes carrying Indonesian technique into South African kitchens. Grains you rarely meet elsewhere — fonio, millet, sorghum, teff — do the daily work here. Start with a country page below rather than the continent; that is the only honest way in.

150 recipes on this route