'There is no recipe, take it or leave it'
Yemisí Aríbisálà on why there are so few Nigerian cookbooks. Illustration by Hannah Ekuwa Buckman.
This essay is part of our supplement Too Many Cookbooks. To read the rest of the series, please click below:
Reinventing the Hexagon, by Jonathan Meades
Machiavelli in the Kitchen, by Rosa Lyster
15 Cookbooks That Changed Everything, by Ruby Tandoh
Cookbooks in Translation, by Guan Chua, Christie Dietz, Anissa Helou, Ibrahim Hirsi, Saba Imtiaz, TW Lim, Lutivini Majanja, Meher Mirza, Marie Mitchell & Rachel Roddy.
I have always been a terrible recipe writer. When my book Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds was published in 2016, for months afterwards people wrote to me extensively about how the recipes in it had failed. In my defence, I wasn’t writing a cookbook, but a book about food in Nigeria, one of the most lucid windows into its culture, to talk about what is sacrosanct, taboo, vital – what we eat and why we eat. I concluded that although I had a good understanding of how food was woven into Nigerian life, I couldn’t translate recipes on to paper because I lacked some key skill (neither can I spell very well). But then again, I come from an environment where reticence – when it comes to recipes, and indeed other topics – was part of the landscape hundreds of years before I arrived on the scene.
For five significant years when I was thinking about and writing my book, I lived in Calabar on the south-eastern coast of Nigeria – a lush city where there is cooking going on 24/7, a city full of lovers of pleasures but pretending not to be. Calabar, the capital city of Cross River State, is an excellent-enough example of non-stop cooking, but I suspect that to really meet the full-fat, interminable, slow-cooked meals that glorify that whole region – dishes like afang soup, ekpang nkukwo, and egome – you would have to travel inwards. Going north by road through small, Potemkin-towns like Akamkpa, Ogoja, Ugep, Yala, Okhanga-Mkpansi … on and on, just short of falling into neighbouring Cameroon.
“In London, giving away your secret recipes in a book would be rewarded with money, publishing deals, maybe celebrity. In Calabar, withholding them would yield power and status and worship.”
In Calabar, food is high calling plus seduction plus enterprise plus social mobility. There, you could never put anyone down for living in the kitchen – whether they were the hired help, the village Cinderella cooking as payment for being put up by a relative, or a long-suffering mistress competing with a Calabar man’s wife. The women of Calabar wear their gastronomic epaulettes with great arrogance, accumulating legendhood by cooking pots of palm oil-infused soups and pottages. One can imagine the kind of commitment to cooking that necessitates making your own palm oil in your backyard. These women become remarkably powerful in their communities in a way that reminds me of the celebrity cooks in London. It doesn’t directly translate, but it doesn’t have to.
One such woman is Thelma Bello. Auntie Thelma is a powerhouse – the quintessential matriarch who catered every room of influence, fed every governor of the state since at least the early 90s. She walks with a stick, from a car accident in her twenties, not an old-age accessory. In all the years I knew her, I never heard Auntie Thelma raise her voice, something one would expect often from a personality who ‘womaned’ large kitchens. Hers was a great confidence, worn by a woman seemingly always holding her cards to her chest.
One of the first unforgettable dishes of Auntie Thelma’s cooking I tasted was her fisherman’s stew at Ths Le Chateau Thelpim Hotels in the early 2000s. You would place your order, then wait to collect it in a small, plain room containing a few tables and chairs, and gyrating ceiling fans, on one side of the hotel compound. The stew looked simple enough – different kinds of whatever white fish was available, and prawns sourced from the Atlantic a few miles out from the Calabar river, cooked in a red stew with palm oil and a sprinkling of ntong leaf and iko leaf. But there was something especially delicious about the stew’s mouthfeel. I felt it skate on the tongue, with an unusual, beautiful smoothness and velvety texture, like an intimate handshake.
After months of spending a small fortune on containers of fisherman’s stew from her at lunchtime, I decided to ask Auntie Thelma for her recipe. I knew I needed to approach this tactically, having already experienced disdain from other elderly women from Calabar when asking for recipes. In Calabar, there would be a clear withdrawal when a request for methodology was made. For the record, I had already tried my hand at Auntie Thelma’s stew and failed to reproduce it. I had tried ‘everything’ – different ways of blending the peppers and tomatoes, different cooking times, different textures of fish, different points of adding the oil. The only time I came close to the original’s mouthfeel was when I added a rogue ingredient. With it, the stew was not exactly like Auntie Thelma’s own, not quite there, but close enough.
How do I know it was a rogue ingredient without having a confirmed recipe? Because once before, I had slipped in the question to Auntie Thelma.
‘Auntie Thelma, what is the recipe for your fisherman’s stew?’