Barbara and I are grateful to photographer Eric Don-Arthur for his lovely portrait of us on Flair’s rooftop dining area.
Finally, I thank God for the grace and strength to see this task through. Gye nyame (“except for God”).
PREFACE
by Fran Osseo-Asare
The Akan people of West Africa recognize what great cooks everywhere know: the secret to good cooking lies in the quality of the ingredients. As they understand in Ghana: “the good soup comes from the good earth” (Twi: “nkwan bεyε dε a, efi fam”).
Let me begin by acknowledging that this book bends several cardinal cookbook rules: some recipes include unfamiliar or exotic ingredients (but with substitutions given where possible), and though many of the recipes are quick and easy, some are not. This book is an unrepentant celebration of West African Ghana’s vibrant cuisine and culture. While the book serves as a basic cooking course guiding anyone who wishes to delve more deeply into Ghana’s (or West Africa’s) culinary cultures, it is also a handy step-by-step cookbook for those with a more casual interest.
Ghana’s exuberant cooking is attractive on many levels: the food is fresh, delicious, healthy, economical, user-friendly, varied, efficient, and flexible. Over the years, my appreciation and enthusiasm for it have only deepened.
I agree with the South African food writer Laurens van der Post who wrote in the 1970s that the cuisine of the rising middle classes in West Africa exhibits “… a kind of morning freshness, their taste is exhilarating and exploratory and their inventiveness lively. And their meals stimulate not only the palate but the mind as well; some of the best conversations I have ever had have taken place over food eaten with West African friends.”1
North Americans continue to explore and embrace new foods, especially ethnic cuisines. The emphases on lighter cooking with more vegetables and complex carbohydrates and less meat, on timesaving meal preparation (while simultaneously rethinking the need for speed via the “slow foods” movement), and on interesting new combinations of foods and seasonings continue to embolden us to broaden our culinary horizons, and to scrutinize some of our prior stereotypes. We have shown ourselves quite open to borrowing and adapting foods from a variety of cultures.
Many books have been written on Caribbean, Cajun, Brazilian, and African-American cooking, all referring vaguely to “African influences.” There is also a crop of encyclopedic African or African Diaspora cookbooks, which while fascinating and needed, can overwhelm someone new to the subject. Finally, the flood of international cookbooks, or specialty cookbooks, such as those on hot and spicy foods, offer African recipes with great unevenness in authenticity. Too often books treat the continent and islands of Africa, numbering well over fifty countries, as a single entity, when even within one country like Ghana there are ten regions with cuisines reflecting distinctive geographies, ingredients, cultures, and histories. While most people recognize such variation in other parts of the world, they tend to overlook it in Africa.
This cookbook is for adventurous but inexperienced cooks who are interested in trying new cuisines; for those who like to cook but are pressed for time or might be on a tight budget; for people who have enjoyed some West African food and want to try their hand at cooking it. And what about folks on gluten-free or sugar-free or dairy-free diets? Or those who follow the slow-foods movement? This cookbook is for them as well.
The Ghana Cookbook is designed as an introductory, but comprehensive, cooking course that builds on basic flavors, textures, and cooking principles, and seasons them with stories, photography, and cultural explanations. This project is the culmination of over four decades of learning on my part, including more than ten years of collaboration with my distinguished partner Barbara Baëta. Though I do the writing and speak in my own voice, Barbara’s profound influence and experience are evident throughout the book.
Now, we warmly welcome you to our kitchen. As we say in Ghana, “Akwaaba!” (“Welcome!”)
1 van der Post, Laurens, and editors of Time-Life Books. African Cooking. New York: Time-Life Books, 1970, p. 62
INTRODUCTIONS
FROM BRISBANE (CA) TO ACCRA — FRAN’S STORY
This cookbook is the one I always wanted to buy and could never find. It is the one I wanted for myself first, and later for my mom, sisters, children, friends, and colleagues—at home, school, work, in my community, and beyond. It is the distillation of decades of living with a foot in two worlds—the United States, where I was born and grew up, and Ghana, my husband’s homeland, and now my adopted country, too.
Let me back up.
In 1957, when I was eight years old and living in California, Great Britain’s West African colony the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first black African country to achieve its independence from a colonial power. At that time, my family was a typical American family blended from immigrants, with a Norwegian grandfather on one side and Appalachian mountain folk on the other. My parents had met in Virginia where my Montana-born dad was stationed in the navy and Appalachian mom was working as a waitress. They moved west to live in Oregon for a few years and then moved south to the San Francisco Bay area in California when I was two. By 1957 I was growing up oblivious to distant Africa. The big news in Brisbane, California, was that Johnny Cash came to sing at the local barbecue restaurant.
Fast forward ten years. The youngest of three daughters, I left home on a scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. Over the next four years I fell in love with a brilliant fellow student from the new Ghana, Kwadwo (k-w-AH-j-oh) Osseo-Asare. He was orphaned, the eldest of four siblings. By my graduation we were discussing marriage. I knew I needed to travel alone to Ghana to find out what I would be getting myself into if we married, and also to reassure my parents (and by that time, step-parents as well) that we could successfully navigate a cross-cultural, cross-racial marriage. That difficult experience is chronicled in my first book, A New Land to Live In (InterVarsity Press, 1977).
After graduation in August 1971, I traveled alone to Ghana to spend a year getting acquainted with his country while he continued on to graduate school in Berkeley. I had only traveled on an airplane once before and was shy and uncertain of my reception. His “aunt” and what seemed like hundreds of relatives met me at the airport in Accra, the capital city. They threw their arms around me, exuberantly calling out “Akwaaba!” (ah-KWAH-ah-bah) which means “welcome” in the Akan language, and captures the essence of Ghana’s famed hospitality. In the same way, the delicious one-pots, soups, and stews I enjoyed in the homes of my new family and friends nurtured and welcomed me in a deeply soothing way. When the time came for me to re-create the meals I was learning to love, and that my husband-to-be had been raised on, my sisters-in-law-to-be and friends were willing to help me—and I was eager to learn.
Ghana and its food captivated me. At the end of my year there Kwadwo and I married in Ghana before returning to the U.S., where I entered a graduate program in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. Eventually we moved to Colorado, then on to Pennsylvania, and had two daughters and a son. I also spent the past four decades traveling back and forth between Ghana and the U.S., deepening my love affair with my husband’s homeland and its cuisine. Our children, too, have had the chance to live both in the United States and in Ghana. Along the way, I also returned to graduate school, this time to a doctoral program in rural sociology at Pennsylvania State University. I wanted to understand how Ghana, blessed with wonderful resources and a decent