My Beauty Best Teacher

Scarlett Lion highlights an endearing NYTimes report about home cooked food:

During the week she hews to African cuisine because, she said, it is healthier than American food. “My whole family is skinny,” she explained. It’s also because African cuisine is all her husband will eat.
Ms. Gray-Brumskine often makes fufu, a rib-sticking mash of potato starch and mashed potatoes from a box, a common American substitution for roots or yams that are used in Africa. She also makes cassava greens; she washes and grinds the leaves, then boils them in a pot with water and baking soda until they turn olive green — a process that can take two hours and often isn’t done until 11 at night. Her husband will wait and eat them then...[continue reading]

Fran Osseo-Asare at Betumi Blog writes:

It is said that when the renowned South African food writer Laurens van der Post was approached in the 1960s to write the Russian volume of the ambitious Time-Life "Foods of the World" series, he was suffering from a medical condition that prevented him from using his hands to write. Instead, he offered the editors an alternate suggestion: that he travel the continent and do the one on Africa (dictating his notes, I believe). Apparently the editors of the series were stunned: they had no idea there was such a thing as "cuisine" in Africa, and had no plans for such a book in their "comprehensive" series. Van der Post assured them it existed...[continue reading]

In the Guardian Jeevan Vasagar reviews Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook:

I long for the day when an Asian history can be written without mentioning curry - but perhaps it can't be done. Here, food makes all the connections. For Alibhai-Brown's children, Africa is beautiful but distressingly violent and poor. Knowledge of its languages fades with time. But just as food crosses barriers between cultures, so it passes history down the generations to her son and daughter. The cuisine recorded here blends Africa and Asia: there are plantains with peanut curry, posho and rice. The first recipe is for fried mogo, cassava chips with salt and chilli, a hallmark of her people's cuisine. Its presence on an Indian wedding menu in Britain is a sure sign that the caterers are Ugandan Asians...[continue reading]

Kikwete gets the enterprise religion.
The need to keep up the pressure on Mugabe despite the unity government deal, especially with the continuance of his party's Neronian extravagances.
Roots Cuisine explores "homeland foods".
Tom Mboya's gift to the world.

Shane Mitchell writing in Saveur:

Photo: James Fisher

I find shelter behind twin blue doors in an alleyway, at the home of Lela Abdulaziz, whose family owns several fruit and vegetable stalls in the city's main market. I struck up a conversation with her earlier this morning, while buying black Zanzibar peppercorns from her father. On hearing that I'd come to Mombasa to learn about the foods eaten here, she invited me for lunch—my first taste of home cooking in this part of East Africa, a region knit together by a complex skein of linguistic and religious kinship that constitutes Swahili culture. In her foyer, Lela sheds her bui-bui, the black robe and head covering worn by many Swahili women, and begins preparing the meal. First, she unfolds a low wooden stool that has a serrated blade affixed to one end. She sits, a half coconut gripped in her hennaed hands, and grates the white meat against the blade into a fired-clay bowl. Then she stuffs handful after handful of shredded coconut into a woven-palm-frond strainer called a kifumbu. I watch as she pours in a cup of water and squeezes the kifumbu to extract the coconut's rich, thick milk, which she stirs into a chicken stew, called kuku wa nazi, that has been simmering in a pot on a charcoal brazier.

Kate Nkansa writing in Feint & Margin:

I often listen to Africans speaking and boasting about how many European countries they have been to, they however fail to mention one African country they have visited. Have you ever heard of anyone mentioning that they have been saving for a trip to visit Timbuktu in Mali, which was a centre of Islamic learning from the 13th to the 17th century...We travel to France to get a taste of French bread and wine; Italy to experience their pasta and pizza; and Switzerland for their cheese and chocolate. What cuisine are African countries celebrated for having?