West Africa boasts one of the humankind ’s most influential cuisines . Its impact can be run into throughout the Black diaspora , from the Caribbean to Latin America to the U.S. Now , asAtlas Obscurareports , anyone can explore the cuisine ’s recipe and history using a free on-line program library calledFeast Afrique .
Food historian and blogger Ozoz Sokoh establish Feast Afrique in January 2021 after crop on the projection for the good part of a decade . have a bun in the oven in Nigeria and currently residing in Canada , Sokoh is passionate about her cultivation ’s cuisine . In 2020 , she collected about 200 digital books on African and African - inspired intellectual nourishment . These texts became the basis of her on-line archive .
Feast Afrique has just as much to offer chronicle buffs as it does food fiend . The text — which come from such spare resources as The Internet Archive , HathiTrust , and The National Academies of Sciences , Engineering , and Medicine — date back to 1828 . Readers will find the earliest documented recipe for jollof Elmer Reizenstein from the 1910 cookbookPractical West African Cookery , as well as early recipe forSouthern cornbreadandCreole Hibiscus esculentus . In gain to recipes , the library contains write that gives important context to how West African cuisine was impacted by the Atlantic slave business deal .
" African , African - American and African - urge knowledge are not often acknowledged in culinary practice , " the introduction to the internet site reads . " I want people to know this and see that African culinary excellence subsist because it ’s hard to know who you are without knowing your history . "
you could get at the more than 190 books and collections in the digital subroutine library atFeastAfrique.com .
[ h / tAtlas Obscura ]
