Now Online: A Free Library Devoted to West Africa’s Food Heritage

O' Be Joyful

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Rufus Estes's 1911 cookbook is included in Sokoh's digital library. Public Domain

In a Youtube video, entitled A Tale of Two Fritters, Ozoz Sokoh is in her kitchen making both akara, a Nigerian bean fritter, and acarajé, the Brazilian equivalent. As she reviews the ingredients and aromatics—black-eyed peas, Thai and Scotch bonnet peppers for heat, tomatoes, ginger, and orange-red palm oil, it’s easy to see that the two dishes, though from different continents, are obviously related.
Sokoh, a food historian born in Nigeria and currently living in Canada, is an expert at making connections between different food cultures. To share her research, she recently launched Feast Afrique, an online library of free digital books that explore the influence of West African foods on culinary cultures around the world. The texts she’s chosen, both cookbooks full of recipes or tomes that touch only briefly on food, speak to the enormous reach and richness of the region’s culinary traditions.



 
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