The Ghana Cookbook News

To my Los Angeles, California, friends: I'll be attending the IACP Conference this weekend (April 1-3, 2016) in Hollywood, and would love to see any foodies (especially African food lovers) Sunday night at the "Creative Showcase" open to the public. 

In other news, The Ghana Cookbook, is shortlisted for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (best African cookbook published outside of Africa). The winners will be announced in Yantai, China May 28-29, 2016, at the Gourmand Awards ceremony. Also, The Ghana Cookbook was just submitted to Les Dames d'Escoffier International for consideration of their MFK Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing. Will keep you posted.

I continue to be immensely grateful for all of the word-of-mouth publicity that you have given to help bring recognition to this book and keep sales up.

IACP hightlights: Chef Pierre Thiam and fonio

A high point for me at this year's  

IACP conference in NYC was attending a session at The International Culinary Center  led by Senegalese Pierre Thiam, the fabulous chef/owner of Le Grand-Dakar, and author of Yolele! Recipes from the Heart of Senegal.  

Pierre had obvious mastery of his subject, a refreshingly calm and humble demeanor, and kept us all entranced with stories of Senegalese culture and cuisine, all the while preparing and offering samples of several delicious recipes using the  amazing tiny millet grain fonio, one of the so-called "lost crops of Africa."

 I have fond memories of time spent inTamale in northern Ghana eating a light, delicious breakfast porridge made from fonio, and was happy a few years ago to learn that Sanoussi Diakité, a Senegalese mechanical engineer, had perfected a mechanical husking machine for  processing of the tiny grain.

There was much enthusiasm at the IACP conference for discovering new grains, and the cookbook that won the Julia Child award was Maria Speck's Ancient Grains for Modern Meals, published by  Ten Speed Press. However, her Mediterranean whole grain focus is on ingredients like barley, farro, kamut, polenta and wheat berries.

One Swiss conference attender enthused to me later that Thiam's session was the best one she had attended so far (this was 4 days into a 5-day conference!) I, too, found it to be quite useful and enjoyable, even though I had to sneak out before the end to set up for the bloggers fair.

I'll post a fonio recipe of my own soon. More to come, too, about the food blogger fair and with lunch with Jessica Harris at Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster.

Washington Post Celebrates West African Cuisine (and travel updates)

February 29, 2012: Happy Leap Year's Day! I was pleased to read Tim Carman's food column today (on West African cuisine) in the online version of  The Washington Post. He had interviewed me at length for background, and I was thrilled that he shared about the search for a publisher for the regional Ghanaian cookbook Barbara Baeta and I are writing. Incidentally, while the bulk of The Washington Post makes its way to our little community, it does not include the Lifestyle/Food section, so consider this a plea for any of you who are in that area to pick up a copy for me and send it to me at BETUMI, P. O. Box 222, State College, PA 16804. Thank you, I'd be very grateful.

Now that I'm back from Nigeria, I head to Oregon for a few days next week, then will attend the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) conference in New York City at the end of March and beginning of April.

Later, in June, I'll be at the IFT (Institute of Food Technologists) annual conference in Nevada,  speaking on

Beyond Peppers, Peanuts, and Palmfruit: The Multilayered Tastes and Textures of African Cuisines 

The presentation  "will introduce sub-Saharan African flavor principles, ingredients, and cooking equipment and techniques, with special emphasis on western Africa. From the special texture created by the ridged grinding bowl called “asanka” in Ghana to the signature steamed bean pudding “moinmoin” of Nigeria, from  “Grains of Paradise” and fonio and other “Lost Crops of Africa,” and on to Africa’s love affair with New World crops (e.g., cassava, maize and peanuts), this session will celebrate the abundance and diversity of good tastes from Africa."

I'm also on the books to teach a new course in the African Studies Department at Penn State for the fall semester: Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

I'll keep you posted on these and other activities. Meanwhile, I'm still filing away a massive amount of papers from the last few months, but haven't forgotten my promise to post the recipe for the cassava biscuits/cookies I made last December. It will be coming soon.

Question #6: What makes YOU the expert, white American lady?

When my book A Good Soup Attracts Chairs came out in 1993 I made a conscious decision not to put my photo on the book jacket. A few months after the cookbook's publication I was speaking to the African-American book buyer for our local university and she looked at me dismissively and said (more or less) "If I'd known you were white, I'd never have gotten the book." Not everyone feels that way, but some, especially African Americans, resent white people telling them how to cook the foods that are part of their heritage. They want to write (and read) their own cookbooks, such as those by Jessica Harris. I can accept that, and understand it. That's why when I do presentations before large groups, if possible I try to be with a (black) African co-presenter.

On the other hand, I don't believe people today think Julia Child, author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was somehow inadequate because she wasn't French. I would never presume to call myself the Julia Child of Ghanaian cuisine, but there are a couple of parallels, particularly in her ability to make French cooking accessible to ordinary people in the U.S.

Since the 1970s I've been eating and learning in the kitchens of family, friends, and colleagues how to prepare Ghanaian food. As a sociologist, a writer, and a "foodie," I've also looked for the stories behind the food. Since marrying my Ghanaian husband in the 1970s I've spent decades looking at his culture from the inside out, and/or the outside in, at a different level than most foreigners will ever have the opportunity to do. I've lived and studied and worked in Ghana. Finally, as a doctoral student in rural sociology during the late 1980s and early 1990s doing ethnographic and survey research, my field work took me around Ghana talking to women and men about the food they eat and grow and purchase.

Did I mention I truly love Ghanaian cuisine? We cook and eat it in our home every week, so in that sense I know what I'm talking about (of course, we also eat Mexican, Brazilian, Japanese, Thai, Italian, Korean, Mediterranean, Eritrean, Moroccan, French, Chinese, regional American, etc. food, too!) Learning to cook Ghanaian dishes, to adjust them for Western palates and substituting for or locating unusual ingredients has taken me years. My first attempts at fufu, for example, were disastrous, as were my early efforts at fermenting cornmeal to make kenkey or banku dough. I remember with pride, though, the stunned look years ago on one Ghanaian university student's face when a group was over at our house chowing down from a huge pot of palmnut soup (along with fufu and omo tuo, or rice balls. He kept looking around, disbelieving that I was the cook. He couldn't even look at me. "But, but, but," he stammered, "she's white. How could she?" I'll always treasure that memory.

Though Ghanaian cooking is basically an oral tradition, I possess an unsurpassed collection of West African and Ghanaian cookbooks as part of the African Cookbook project. I have spent months shadowing master cooks at Flair Catering in Ghana and received a travel grant to travel throughout the country to study cooking in all 10 regions, including the unfamiliar northern regions of Ghana. That makes me able to fill in the many blanks in other's books and experiences, frequently written or explained by Ghanaians who do not quite understand how much North Americans don't know about their country and culture or that Ghanaians modify (unnecessarily) to please the imagined foreign palate. Other culinary writing by short-term Western visitors to Ghana frequently suffers from "stranger's eyes" who miss a lot and make lots of amusing (and incorrect) assumptions. I have finally recognized my place at the intersection of two worlds is a strength.

As I've said before, I got fed up (pun intended) hearing the negative and distorted nonsense people said about West African cooking, so started writing about it from my perspective (see link under features to the article "We eat first with our eyes: on Ghanaian cuisine." ) I also ended up doing a lot of cooking demonstrations for schools, 4-H, scouting and other community, church, etc., groups, including the African and nonAfrican community (faculty, staff, and students) at Penn State where my husband teaches and where I earned my doctorate.

After the 1993 book I insisted I'd never write another cookbook. It was a very time-consuming and detail-oriented project (undertaken while I was completing my doctoral dissertation and raising 3 children), I had to learn to be a food photographer, and the multiple recipe testings part was a hassle, too. Nevertheless, that book catapulted into the world of culinary professionals, and I joined a group Julia Child helped found, the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals). My career has shifted dramatically since that time, and in 1997 I founded the African Culinary Network. In the mid-1990s I was approached several times about writing the sub-Saharan Africa volume for an upcoming Greenwood Press series on Food Culture Around the World, including several persuasive emails from series editor Ken Albala. The first few times I brushed the idea off because I was no expert on sub-Saharan African food: I only knew a bit about Ghanaian and Anglophone West African cooking.

Finally, I recognized that if I didn't write it, it might not get written at all, or else someone who didn't care as much as I did might do it and not get it right. I began immersing myself as much as possible into sub-Saharan African culture (travel, books, films, restaurants, internet research, interviewing people, etc.) Several years and trips to Africa later, by the time the book came out in 2005, I realized that I do in fact know more about African cuisines that most people in North America. Also that most people I know in Ghana and other parts of Africa do not have the luxury of studying and writing about their cuisines, and appreciate my efforts. I also realize that people outside of Africa (or in other parts of Africa) ARE interested, and curious, and that is another reason behind this blog.

Finally, I've been fortunate to live in different parts of the U.S., from Berkeley, CA to Cambridge, MA; from Golden, Colorado to central Pennsylvania; beyond the U.S., from Ghana to Japan to the U.K. to Brazil. Plus I've been able to travel extensively: Hawaii, Louisiana, Texas, Nigeria, China, South Africa, France, Tanzania. . . You get the idea. Mix all these experiences together and you understand that I have quite an international perspective. When that is blended with my specific set of personal experiences: my writing career, my community organizing and sociology backgrounds, raising my own 3 children and 2 adopted nephews from Ghana, my teaching and instructional design experiences, my love of good food, etc., they have created in me a passion (I use that overworked cliché warily, but it is at heart a wonderful word) to share what I know.