The global impact of the West African cuisine history is underrated. A great deal is often said about how the global West influenced African culture through colonization, culinary trade routes, and other means of contact. However, the reciprocal impact of the global food history Africa on diasporans and their Western communities is often underplayed.
The African diaspora has spread traditional Nubian techniques and ingredients worldwide. This happened in the course of African transacting marchantile business, or migrating as freemen or slaves.
This piece will focus on West African spices and cuisines, and how they penetrated global food markets. Some African diaspora cuisines have taken a new form from their local variants. Come along to find out how such transformations came to be.
The Ancient West African Spice Web
The spice trade in Africa became a subject of study long after Western traders and explorers discovered some spices of interest in the region. Tamarind, alligator pepper, selim pepper, grains of paradise, and dawadawa (fermented locust beans) are some of the most prominent of African native spices.
African culinary history also reveals that these spices left the continent through the Trans-Saharan trade route. The African spice route cuts across West Africa, to North Africa, to the Middle East, and forks out in Europe.
Interestingly, long before the advent of colonial trade routes, West African flavors and ingredients had commenced their global diffusion. Inferred fragments of West African cuisine history can be extracted from the works of historians like Dierk Lange. Multiple historical theses suggest that Africa had established trade systems before being sliced into colonial caches.
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Culinary Techniques That Traveled
Several dishmaking or food preparation techniques are direct offshoots of the food culture of West Africa. While it may be careless to assert Africa as the source of these processing techniques, the region did contribute its fair share to global adoption.
Layered slow-cooking stews are one of the global cuisines that Africa influenced. Such dishes often involve the infusion of spices in base aromatics before introducing the proteins.
Similarly, West African spices like dawadawa exported African fermentation traditions to other climes. It is undeniable that countries in the global West have a milieu of fermented foods. However, dawadawa and similar fermented items in African diaspora foods have changed the narrative in umami-based cooking.
In modern times, some food developers are incorporating liquid smoke into dishes to induce smoked and charred flavors. Meanwhile, West African dried spice flavors sometimes contribute such sensory attributes to food traditionally. Traces of such trends in diaspora food are reflections of the reach of West African cuisine history.
Diaspora Influence: The New World Connection
After the global colonial syndicates started falling apart in the late 18th century, Africans in the diaspora regained freedom and started lives of their own. Even before emancipation, many slaves preserved their cooking traditions. So much so that after regaining freedom from the regimented slave lives, they proceeded to reconnect with their roots by making African diaspora food. All the required ingredients and spices are not always at hand, but they manage to improvise. Over time, these emancipated slaves were able to rewrite their West African cuisine history in strange lands.
There are some global dishes that you did not even know have Western African culinary DNA. Take Southern U.S. gumbo as an example. West African slaves introduced crops like okra, yams and black-eyed peas to the Americas, and often used the okra as a soup thickener. The thickening okra became the basis for the popular gumbo dish, and even the name has West African roots.
Feijoada is a dish with a national identity in Brazil. It is undeniably a fusion dish, influenced by Brazilian, Portuguese and African diets. However, the primary ingredient, black-eyed peas, arrived in Brazil on West African slave ships.
In the Caribbean, some popular dishes borrow from the West African cuisine history. The dishes are Pepperpot and Callaloo. Fairly the same, but Callaloo is the more popular of the two, and is named after a leafy green, amaranth. Callaloo has origins in West Africa, and the Caribbean dish is quite similar to the soupy delicacy still savored in countries like Nigeria.
Modern Global Food’s West African Roots
Currently, there are various fusion dishes, selling in world-class restaurants around the world, that have touches of West African cuisine history. Cities like Paris, London and NYC are playing host to a wide range of diasporans from around the globe. To cater for the culinary preferences of this peculiar lot, restaurants are starting to embrace African fusion cooking. It is also a lucrative business model, as African diasporans are often willing to pay a premium for such traditional servings far away from home.
Chefs like Pierre Thiam are popularizing this business model by introducing native African produce like suya spice, yassa and fonio in places like the US. Also, more Western fine dining businesses are starting to accommodate West African culinary elements. Such accommodations may include the use of African indigenous heat ingredients like alligator pepper. It may also include the incorporation of traditional smoking methods or fermentation ingredients to help the average diasporan have a taste of ‘motherland.’
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Health science studies are also partly responsible for the recent global popularity of African cuisines. Many of these studies are revealing amazing and previously obscure nutritional profiles of some native African crops. From the foregoing, it is easy to see that traditional African flavors have influenced global cuisines and are still shaping them.
From the Sahel to São Paulo, West Africa’s flavors form some of the world’s deepest culinary roots.
