Update on Africa Cookbook Project

Here are the 3 latest additions, all paperbacks,  to the Africa Cookbook Project, which I launched semi-officially in 2007. I'm still collecting cookbooks. Two of the cookbooks are Ghanaian and one is Kenyan.

The Ghana Cookery Book was originally compiled by the Gold Coast Branch of the British Red Cross Society and published in 1933 as The Cold Coast Cookery Book. In 2007, David Saffery (who seems to have made a career out of republishing old African cookbooks) reprinted it via the "Jeppestown Press" in London, dressed it up with a glossy cover of Ghanaian GTP textiles, and used illustrations from both the original book and the 1922 South and East African Year Book). As would be expected, it is basically a "Western" cookbook, whose (unedited) recipes were contributed by residents in Ghana "upon whom the sole condition was imposed that all the ingredients of every recipe should be easily obtainable in the Gold Coast." This includes things like canned asparagus, cheese, and strawberry jam ;-)  While most of the recipes are quite foreign to Ghana, several--especially those provided by Sister Antonia (Keta) and Sister Angele (Cape Coast)-- do include some indigenous dishes (e.g., palmnut soups, tigernut cream, garden egg and groundnut soups, okra stew). It's an important historical addition to my collection.

At the other end of the spectrum is another recently self-published Ghanaian cookbook, Akwaaba, A Taste of Ghana (Recipes from the African Gold Coast) by Sandra Amoako, a young  woman from Accra who attended Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and is part of a growing group of Ghanaians who are proud of their culinary heritage and want to introduce it to Western audiences. She has included a helpful index in the book. It covers the same general territory (about 50 recipes and variations) as other books, includes some time-saving adaptations, and is a welcome addition to the introductory cookbooks on Ghanaian cuisine.

From Kenway Publications in Nairobi/Kampala/Dar es Salaam (a subsidiary of East African Educational Publishers Ltd.) comes a classic cookbook based on her long-running  popular television cooking shows Mke Nyumbani: Alice Taabu's Cookery Book,  and first published in 2001. It is carefully illustrated with black and white drawings, and is clearly intended for a Kenyan audience.