Today a photo from a fermentation workshop I held a few years ago popped up on my FaceBook timeline.
It made me a little sentimental. Teaching people new ideas and skills has been one of the most rewarding things about my career, a career which is taking a slight pause right now (thanks, COVID-19 pandemic). But this pause have given me time to reflect on a few things, and one of them is the inequities of the culinary world. The recent demonstrations about police brutality and the systemic racism that causes it are shining a light into some of the other areas of life that might need a little attention. One of those is the often-overlooked but very amazing and healthy foods that come from the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of humanity, Africa.
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| Step 1. Chop, add water and salt or sugar (depending) |
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| Step 2. Let it sit for a few days or longer. |
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| Step 3. Enjoy! |
Fermentation helps break down elements in food that can be hard to digest, improves the nutrient profile and deepens the flavor of food. It also replenishes good bacteria in the digestive tract and boosts brain function and so many other processes in the body.
All cultures in the world ferment or fermented, before refrigerators made us lazy. In most places, around 30% of food was fermented. Due to the fact that human cultures originated in Africa, the way food was preserved also migrated with the precursor populations of the rest of the world. According to fermentation guru and award-winning author Sandor Katz, 60-70% of traditional Sudanese food is fermented. Of all places on earth, the place with the most insanely awesome fermentation culture is Sudan. One of my life goals is to go to south Sudan and learn more about the amazing cuisine, culture and people. Although Sudan has the richest tradition of delicious fermented foods, the people of west Africa also had a preference for deep flavors and spices, often using ginger, pepper, mustard and other spices introduced by Arab spice traders.
Let’s get a little bit more serious now.
During the transatlantic human trafficking and enslavement of Africans, so much of their ancestral food ways were lost to them, due to having to prepare the foods of their European captors to suit their uber-vanilla tastes (spicy food was considered crass due to the French being considered the classiest by the rest of colonizer culture and having a preference for balanced flavors over spiciness).
Even though Africans had their culture and heritage taken from them, a taste for spicy and complex flavors led to new discoveries.
Hot sauce is a new world invention (peppers are a new world plant), first recorded in Jamaica in the 1700s, where indigenous Jamaican and African slaves were observed using it as medicine, mixing it in with the patient’s food.
Although the invention of hot sauce is often credited to a white slave owner named Edward McIlhenny, the likelihood of a rich white guy nearly a century later cooking seems far-fetched, given what we know about plantations. The whole idea on plantations was for black and indigenous people to do all the work and white people to get the credit.
The contributions of Africa to the culinary world are substantial, and tell the collective story of humanity, no matter your ethnic heritage. It’s important that we know the history of our food, so that we can understand the world we live in and work to make it better.
P.S.
Here’s a recipe I’ve been wanting to try. - https://www.africanbites.com/african-pepper-sauce/
Here’s a great article about the history of American hot sauce. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/how-did-hot-sauce-get-in-so-many-african-americans-bags-anyway/2016/04/21/63bebca0-07d2-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html
Here’s a link to Sandor Katz’s fermentation website. - https://www.wildfermentation.com
