When they were growing up and learning to cook, I could find no African cookbooks to help me teach my children, so I wrote my own, A Good Soup Attracts Chairs (Pelican Publishing Company, 1993). That cookbook also came in handy when we adopted two nephews from Ghana and brought them to live with us in the U.S. after their mother, my husband’s sister (and one of my earliest teachers), died.
I always longed for a definitive guide to cooking Ghanaian food, but felt unequal to the daunting task of authoring such a cookbook alone. One of the first African cookbooks I discovered was the African volume of the 1970 Time-Life series on Foods of the World (African Cooking), authored by Laurens van der Post. It included a full-page color photo of a young Barbara Baëta catering a buffet luncheon in Accra. She was described as “one of Ghana’s leading culinary experts,” who opened her catering service in 1968. According to the photo caption, “an invitation to one of her dinners is highly prized.” I then noticed the name Barbara Baëta reappearing in acknowledgments in books by other authors. I learned of Barbara’s famous company in Accra, Flair Catering Services, and discovered that she had authored some influential recipe cards in the 1970s. One day in the early 2000s, while lamenting to my husband that Barbara Baëta would be the ideal person to work with, he mentioned that he had gone to high school in Ghana (Achimota) with her brother Basil, a physician in Canada. How did I not know that?
We promptly made a trip to see him, and left a copy of my Ghanaian primer A Good Soup Attracts Chairs to give to his sister when she next visited. A year later Barbara and I arranged to meet face-to-face. We were instantly at ease with one another. She shared that she had tried several of the recipes in my book and they were very good. She also mentioned that people were always asking her to write a cookbook, but she was too busy and not really one to sit down and write. She invited me to spend time at her school and catering company to explore collaboration. I spent several weeks at Flair in 2002 and received a grant from the International Association of Culinary Professionals in 2004 to visit again, as well as to travel throughout the regions of Ghana gathering information for our book. I have made innumerable additional visits to Ghana and Flair since then.
A surprise along my journey was the meshing of my personal and professional interests. The more deeply I researched sub-Saharan African cuisines in general (and Ghana’s in particular) the more I became aware of a need for more information about sub-Saharan African cuisine and gastronomy. Despite the welcome explosion of writing and blogging and “YouTubing” about African cuisines, it is sometimes accompanied by naiveté and an uncritical embrace of ingredients and techniques, as well as a lack of information to help translate the cooking from a local, indigenous context to an international one.
Thus the nature of this book has broadened to include not just anecdotes about personal experiences, but information and photos to help place the recipes in context and give detailed instructions to “fill in the blanks.”
However, before diving into recipes, let me introduce Barbara.
FROM GHANA WITH LOVE—BARBARA’S STORY
Barbara Baëta, also known as Amesika Barbara Rose Baëta and fondly called “Auntie Sika” by family and friends, is a beloved national treasure of Ghana.
One of the country’s first internationally and formally trained hospitality industry professionals, Barbara has cooked for every head of state of Ghana since it became the first black African country to receive independence in 1957 (Kwame Nkrumah through current President John Mahama, whose wife, incidentally, is a graduate of Flair Catering Services). The list of dignitaries she has served reads like a global who’s who; Flair prepared the one state meal served to President Barack Obama and his family during their July 2009 trip to Ghana. She remembers fondly preparing other state meals for well-known figures such as Jimmy Carter, Queen Elizabeth II, U Thant, the Prince of Wales, Emperor Haile Selassie, President Thabo Mbeki, and the Sultan of Brunei.
Barbara comes from a distinguished family. A member of the Ewe ethnic group, she is descended from royalty. Her paternal great-great-great grandfather sailed from Portugal to West Africa to buy rubber and gold, married a Ghanaian king’s daughter from Keta, and stayed. For her years of support to her community of Anloga in the Keta District of the Volta region, Barbara was made an honorary “Queen Mother” with the royal name of “Mama Hogbe.” Her family represents a global melting pot: a great-great-grandmother was the daughter of a Danish man who came to build the fort along the coast and a local Ghanaian woman. The original Baëta brother who came to Ghana also plied his trade in Brazil. There he and other family members mixed with and acquired Brazilian relatives.
Outstanding men and strong, pioneering, independent women characterize Barbara’s family. Her grandmother braved the scorn of the local mission middle school headmaster to become the first girl admitted to the Keta middle school. (He disdainfully asked: “What do you want here … All the learning you will ever need is to be able to do sums about chickens [koko-kunta, i.e., chicken arithmetic], and that you can do already.”2) This same grandmother became a teacher and at age eighteen founded the YWCA in Keta in the then Gold Coast. An aunt, Annie Baëta Jiagge, became Ghana’s second woman lawyer and first female Appeal Court judge. Barbara’s father, Rev. Prof. Emeritus Christian Baëta, was a world-renowned theologian who taught at the Department of Religion at the University of Ghana, Legon.
The eldest of five children, including a sister and three brothers, Barbara herself has always accepted responsibility for looking after and nurturing them and others. She continues to do so, seamlessly combining her personal and professional lives.
At around age four or five, Barbara Baëta began spending holidays at her grandmother’s farm at Aflao, near the Ghana-Togo border. She helped cook, learned to make bread, and learned to sew. She looked forward to the visits and they instilled in her a lifelong love of cooking and a fascination with fashion and design.
As she grew from a five-year-old playing under the coconut trees, she pursued her interest in food and the hospitality industry, both academically and practically. After attending the prestigious Achimota Secondary School, she furthered her education in hotel and institutional management at the Huyton College for Girls in Liverpool, England, then at Glascow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science, returning to Ghana in January 1960.
She became Director of Food Services and Hostels at the YMCA in Accra. In 1964 while still in her twenties, Barbara was awarded a technical aid 18-month scholarship by the Canadian government to study large-scale food management and interior decoration with top institutions and individuals across Canada. By 1967 Ghana’s government appointed her Ghana’s official hostess to the 1967 World Expo (the World’s Fair held in Montreal that year), and she prepared a Ghanaian banquet for 500 people, renting the equipment and staff she needed, and bringing Ghanaian ingredients with her. She returned to her work at the YMCA, but after a year announced to her parents, “Look, if I can go to Canada and do this kind of function for 500 people by myself, why am I still working for somebody?” Her experience gave Barbara the confidence to establish her own business, borrowing about $200 from Barclays Bank and insisting on doing it by herself.
Before leaving Canada after the Expo, she had dinner with some friends, and announced her aspirations: “I’m going home. I want to start my own business. I want something with F for food, fashion, and flowers. Find me a name.” One of her friends thought a while and said “But Barbara, you always do everything with flair anyway.” Bingo. “Flair Catering Services” was established in 1968, and has always been distinguished by its sophisticated and quality preparation and presentation of Ghanaian traditional dishes as well as cuisines from other countries. Barbara also established the nonprofit Flair Vocational Training Institute to help equip young people, especially young girls, with marketable skills in the hospitality industry. Over 1,500 young people from throughout Africa have been trained through her institute’s efforts.
Barbara exudes Ghana’s famed hospitality and generosity. Her disarming smile, humility, and infectious joy and optimism draw even strangers to her and make them feel special and welcome. In 2011 President Mills awarded her one of Ghana’s highest medals, the Order of the Volta, for distinguished service to the nation. A deep spirituality and sense