Author of Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds, Yemisi Aribisala, believes there are numerous reasons we enjoy food, beyond ingredients and social conditioning: ‘things like memory of how we ate certain things in childhood and for so long that we want it just like that. Sometimes we attach a dish to a beloved parent or lover.’
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What kinds of food did you grow up eating or reading about?
I grew up eating quite basic fare-bread and margarine, or stolen butter (butter was really only bought because of my father); plenty of rice and fried plantains; fried plantains and stew it seemed on most afternoons after school; Okro cooked the brisk Yoruba way with potash served with freshly made stew and Eba; ‘Efo riro’, some special weekends with pounded yam made in the machine (because my father didn’t like people sweating into his food), or sprinkled Sundays in the month where we had fried rice and pork chops; meals with chicken and guinea fowls, beef etc. I was fascinated the first time I ate ‘Afang’ soup at a friend’s house. I couldn’t identify all the sophisticated points of flavour.
The 1976 version of Jeni Wright’s St Michael All Colour Cookery Book was my...
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