Cooking the West African Way is a great introduction to cooking food from West Africa. This cookbook contains recipes from Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Benin. The authors carefully explain the food culture of West Africa. For example, how many Eat Africans only eat a couple of times a day and eat very fresh food due to the lack of electricity and refrigeration.

This book is geared to Americans who want to learn to make West African recipes so the recipes use American measurements, utensils, and methods. There are two sample dinner menus in this cookbook along with the shopping list for each dinner menu. Cooking the West African Way includes basic cooking instructions and explanations of cooking equipment, terms, safety, special ingredients, along with low-fat cooking tips and metric conversions.

Cooking the West African Way includes the following recipes:

Fufu
Sweet Potato Fritters (Ntomo Krako)
Groundnut Sauce
Akara
Groundnut Balls (Kulikuli)
Coconut Crisps
Sweet Balls (From Ghana)
Fruit Salad
Boiled Corn and Beans (Abrow ne Ase)
Boiled, Fried, Grilled, and Baked Plantains
Egusi Soup
Fresh Fish Pepper Soup
Okra Soup
Jollof Rice
Spinach Stew
Vegetables in Peanut Suace
Casamance Fish Stew (Kaldou)
Curry
Chicken Yassa (Yassa au Poulet)
Ginger-Fried Fish
Yams and Squash (Futari)
Chickpea Salad
Groundnut Cookies


This is a great starting cookbook for West African cooking. There are color pictures for almost every recipe along with clear instructions and cultural explanations.

The fufu recipe in Cooking the West African Way is rather disappointing since the recipe calls for cream of wheat and mashed potato flakes instead of casava or yams. I have linked to my more authentic fufu recipe at the bottom of this article.

Cooking the West African Way is available at Amazon.com

This copy of Cooking the West African Way was purchased by me with my own funds.