“Food was a way
to remember home
and culture”
Inspired by her father’s kitchen tales of decades past and drawn to
far-flung family members, journalist Kemi Bamgbose traces the trail of herdad’s much-loved dishes – from London to their roots in West Africa and Brazil
TASTES LIKE HOMEM
y most vivid childhood
memories are of time
spent with my dad in my
family’s kitchen in south London.
Dad was Nigerian with Afro-
Brazilian roots and moved to the
UK more than 30 years ago. He was
a keen cook and, as we helped him
sift through piles of black-eyed
beans, getting rid of any cracked or
shrivelled ones, he’d tell us stories
about Nigeria, bringing to life the
Lagos of his youth.
Both sides of his family (the
Alakijas and Bamgboses) were
prominent ‘returnees’, the name
given to families who’d left Braziland gone back to Nigeria when
slavery was abolished in Brazil in- Many continued to travel
between West Africa and Brazil,
with a small contingent settling
permanently in Salvador de Bahia
on the northeastern coast of Brazil.
Dad used to cook dishes such as
frejon, a coconut and black-eyed
bean soup eaten at Easter among
descendants of returnee families.
He’d also make moin moin, a bean
cake steamed in banana leaves, and
jollof beans, cooked in a rich tomato
sauce (see recipe, p76).
He told us about the colourful
costumes and dancing at the annual
carnival in Lagos, set up by returnee
families as a way of remembering
their ancestors and the end of
slavery. It seemed faraway and
exotic compared to London. It was
only years later that I made the
connection between Dad’s
reminiscences and our careful
culinary preparations: black-eyed
beans are the base of many a dish
in Nigeria and Brazil; they’re an
edible link between continents and
people, past and present.
Inspired by Dad’s stories, last year
I fulfilled a long-held dream and
travelled to Salvador de Bahia to
meet distant family members – and
food was at the heart of my journey.
For many enslaved West Africans,
food was a way to remember home
and their culture, and it was also
important in some religious
practices. Every aspect of Salvador
reminded me so much of Lagos, a
place I’d visited, from the people to
the music, the arts and culture to
the Portuguese-influenced colonial-
style architecture. But most striking
of all was the similarity in cuisine.
On my first night in Salvador
I walked along the pier and caught
the familiar pungent scent of palm
oil on the sea breeze. Following my
nose, I found my first taste of home,
an acarajé stall. Acarajé (akara in
Yoruba) was brought to Brazil by
enslaved West Africans and is now
a popular street food typically sold
by Baianas, black women who dress
in white, lace-trimmed clothing
with colourful head wraps, who
have since become an important
cultural symbol of Bahia’s rich
West African heritage.
The mashed black-eyed bean
cakes are fried in a calorific vat of
dende (palm oil), with sliced onion
to add flavour. The cooked cakes are
cut in half and filled with shrimp,
okra or vatapa, a spicy paste, and
accompanied by salad. Acarajé plays
an important role in the Afro-
Brazilian religion Candomblé,
where bean cakes are offered to the
Orishas, a pantheon of deities