This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Ex africa semper aliquid novi, except in food. From south of the Sahara, the continent has contributed astonishingly little — relative to its size — to other people’s cuisines. Yams have become naturalised in parts of the U.S., but “soul” food generally has no more to do with Africa than cajun cooking does with France or Tex-Mex with the Aztecs.

Okra’s diffusion owes more, I think, to mediators in Arabia and Persia than to the people amongst whom it originated. Ostrich made a brief flash in the frying-pan in fashion-conscious kitchens late in the last century but has disappeared from supermarket shelves.

Most of the dishes I’ve been tempted to try involve ingredients or techniques of foreign provenance: the curries of Cape Malays or East-African Asians, or the French- or Portuguese-inflected foods of empire. You can say what you like about European empires, but they improved African cooking.

Except in Ethiopia, Sub-Saharan Africa has no traditional courtly or peculiarly elite cuisines

If few or no indigenous recipes have attracted cooks, except in migrant communities, I think it’s because (except in Ethiopia) Sub-Saharan Africa has no traditional courtly or peculiarly elite cuisines. My late lamented friend Jack Goody searched the continent for them, but found that the elite ate the same food as everyone else, only more of it. Most African restaurants abroad are Ethiopian, doubtless because the emperor’s table was unusual amongst those of his fellow-rulers, with the elaborate rituals Laurens van der Post reported: for every two guests there was one footman in green velvet, gold-braided livery and a choice of French or native confections flavoured “with all the spices of Abyssinia”.

The effects of European intrusions are nowhere more redemptive of indigenous dishes than in Equatorial Guinea, where, uniquely, Spaniards and natives liked each other’s food and created a perfect synthesis, such as would have been impossible where English, French or German bosses maintained a haughty preference for what came in cans and bottles from home.

Something similarly symbiotic happened wherever my fellow countrymen went. In formerly Spanish America you can detect Spanish heritage, along with traditions unbroken since pre-colonial times, in aspects of imported culture that natives found attractive — the religion, the laws, the music, the language and the food.

The Philippines have, for the same reasons, and for my taste, the best food in Asia. In the Hispanic world, however, traffic in influence has been largely one-way. In Spain you don’t find any domestic culinary tributes to the former subjects of empire. There are no naturalised equivalents of curry in England or cous-cous in France.

“Are you made of chocolate?” asked the daughter of the house where I lived as a student in Salamanca, when a refugee family arrived from Equatorial Guinea — fleeing the bloody effusions of newly conceded independence in 1968. The little girls of contrasting colours instantly became fast friends, and my hostess’s kitchen began to yield new and intriguing aromas.

The childishly innocent question was strangely appropriate, as American chocolate, chillies, tomatoes and peanuts were, along with Spanish garlic and Filipino coconuts, amongst the defining ingredients Spaniards introduced to their African colony to offset losses elsewhere as their New World empire shrank and vanished.

In Equatorial Guinea today, palm oil, the liquid gold of West Africa — and a product European invaders chiefly sought during the global crisis of lipids in the 19th century — remains cheap and abundant and therefore predominates for frying.

But I like to tilt the recipes in a peninsular direction by substituting olive oil. Banana leaves keep cooks in touch with traditions older than implements.

They are still serviceable receptacles for cooking in ashes or hot sand, or in the vapour from pits filled with water and hot rocks, in a style that dates from before pots or pans were invented: it is no disgrace to use an oven or a bain-marie instead.

A dish that combines the best of Equatorial Guinea requires a paste of finely pounded bitter chocolate and crunchily fragmented peanuts with pinches of chilli, salt and muscovado sugar and plenty of garlic emulsified with olive oil. The balance of ingredients is a matter of taste and can be adjusted to suit.

The daub will coat perfectly a chicken breast — or a whole fish of robust texture and mild flavour, nutty or earthy, such as red mullet or red snapper — before folding in a banana leaf and baking with sweet potatoes, tomatoes and onions.

After a salad of sliced palm hearts and dates, dressed with a squeeze each of orange and lemon, palates will be ready for pudding: grilled bananas, honey, grated coconut.