Out of Africa

It's not that I don't love Italian food. I adore pesto-laced meatballs, herb-doused vegetable melanges, freshly made ravioli filled with butternut squash, Sicilian specialties with their deeply satisfying tomato sauces. Yes, I do. But it has been wearing on me for years now that food magazines so often feature Italy as a destination, or they feature Italian food. Truly, with all due respect to the great cuisines of Italy, this has gotten old, people.

I recently made a friend on Twitter, Courtney, and she and I have exchanged a few E-mails about African food. Why isn't the food of the vast continent of Africa explored more often? Africans continent-wide have done amazing things with beans, okra, peanuts, plantains, etc. The easterners have perfected curry as well as the Indians. The former colonization brought with it at least one good thing, namely hybridization of African foods with French, Portuguese and other cuisines.

But start to look for African cookbooks for an American audience, and you will be hard pressed to find many. Marcus Samuelsson, the acclaimed African-Swedish chef, has explored the foods of his continent of origin in The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa. Dr. Jessica B. Harris wrote The Africa Cookbook several years ago, and it's a classic book by now--good for those looking for authenticity. And there are a few other books available but, relatively speaking, they are few and far between.

Just when Courtney and I were exchanging our thoughts on the underrepresentation of African foods in the U.S., coincidentally, the first issue that I received of the Thornes' newsletter, Simple Cooking, was a special issue devoted to African foods! It was full of well-researched information and contained several recipes.

African food needs to have its day in the spotlight. I want injera and Ethiopian curries, bobotie, rusks, black-eyed pea fritters, gombo, chicken with rice, West African-style, just as much as all those great things I listed from Italy. When the wave comes, I will be there riding it.