Zoe's Ghana Kitchen | Zoe Adjonyoh
Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen: An Introduction to New African Cuisine - From Ghana with Love
By Zoe Adjonyoh
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Hello, my name is Zoe Adjonyoh. I'm very happy to be here talking about my cookbook, Zoe's Ghana Kitchen.
Suzy Chase: Before diving into this book, I'd like to thank my new sponsor, Bloomist. Bloomist creates and curates simple, sustainable products that inspire you to design a calm, natural refuge at home. I'm excited to announce they've just introduced a new tabletop and kitchen collection that's truly stunning. Surround yourself with beautiful elements of nature when you're cooking, dining and entertaining, and make nature home. Visit bloomist.com and use the code Cookery20 to get 20% off your first purchase or click the link in the show notes. Now, on with the show.
Suzy Chase: You're a chef, writer and speaker on the intersection between food, culture, identity and politics. And, for the past 12 years or so, you've been promoting and evangelizing the fantastic flavors of West Africa. Now, this has been a personal exploration of your identity through food. I'd love for you to kick us off with that.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Yes. Zoe's Ghana Kitchen as a book, as a brand, as an idea is a really very personal unfolding story of my relationship with my ancestry through food, I guess, contextually it's important to mention that both my parents were immigrants to the UK. My mother's Ireland ... Irish, sorry. My mother isn't Ireland, she's Irish. And, my father is Ghanaian. They both immigrated to London in the '70s, in a time of no Blacks, no Irish, no dogs, that's all very much out there as a statement. They came here with not much money, so they were poor immigrants trying to make a life for themselves. I'm born as the first English person in my family. So I'm a third culture kid, if you can still get away with being a kid in your 40s, which I'd like to think you can.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Yeah. Geographically, Ireland is obviously very close to the UK and is very cheap, economically, to travel to. We spent a lot of childhood, all available school holidays and things like that, were spent in Ireland. I had a really strong sense of Irishness, Irish culture and what that meant in terms of who I was in my personality.
Zoe Adjonyoh: What I didn't have was that same sense of relationship with Ghana and Ghanaian culture. Though my dad is Ghanaian, he wasn't a very permanent presence in my childhood. But when he was around, I feel there's a very, very strong part of my memory of my dad as a kid. We didn't have a Ghanaian extended family in London. So I had this big gap in my understanding of who I was, on that side of my ancestry.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Coming back to food, my dad used to bring home these amazing ingredients, like kenkey, which is fermented maize, though a little bit like a tamale. Shito, this really beautiful, spicy condiment with smoked crayfish, and smoked prawns and variations and fishes. All of these textures and flavors were wildly different, obviously, to anything that I'd become familiar with in Ireland. It wasn't just that these ingredients came into the home, it was how my dad had a relationship with those ingredients and food.
Zoe Adjonyoh: He would cook for himself. It was a very personal, private moment, meditative thing, that he was cracking on with. He didn't have much inclination, generally speaking, to equip my sister and I with any foundational culture. So the language of Twi or Fante, for example, he wasn't very interested in teaching us. He was very keen for us to assimilate.
Zoe Adjonyoh: The food, then, became this tool, I found from quite a young age, by which I could access Ghana and have a relationship with it. Does that answer the question?
Suzy Chase: Yeah, totally. I've heard you say that, where your Irishness and Ghanaian-ishness ...
Zoe Adjonyoh: I'll take it.
Suzy Chase: Collide, is that you're both feeders.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: Both cultures are feeders.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Absolutely. There's much more in common between the cultures than anyone would probably imagine, actually.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Ireland has a very strong Catholic association, so religion is a big deal in family there, in the South of Ireland. And, religion, Christianity in a more general sense, is a very big deal also, in Ghana, as a former colony. Those are two big central themes.
Zoe Adjonyoh: But also yeah, feeding people and family. The concept is family and it taking a village, so family and extended family are both quite important aspects to both those cultures. As well as the fun stuff, or the other fun stuff I should say because food is fun, and family is fun if you've got a good one. But also, things like dancing, and music, and storytelling and the oral traditions.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Yeah. I discovered, mostly through going back to Ghana in 2013 when I was arming myself with recipes for this book, just how much those two cultures had in common, actually. Yeah. It was a very fascinating realization.
Suzy Chase: So after a trip to Ghana in 2013, you deepened your knowledge and found a new relationship to the ingredients after discovering the three women in your father's house all had three different takes on jollof.
Zoe Adjonyoh: So going back to Ghana in 2013 was to get a really good, grounding sense of what these recipes are in their place of origin. Because also, while my dad introduced the recipes to our house, it was my mom who kept that cuisine alive, really. My Irish mother, recreating those dishes. In the context of what is traditional in your home, I only knew what I grew up eating. It was important to go to Ghana and really understand what the vibrancy, and the texture and the flavor was like, on the ground. But also, to expand my own knowledge and repertoire. I did that through being in my grandmother's house, and making my aunties take me to markets and them cooking with me.
Zoe Adjonyoh: The other part of it was I was very, very concerned with not culturally appropriating my own culture, which I think baffled some people. But, being of mixed race heritage, being biracial, I didn't want Ghanaians or the Ghanaian community, either in London or in Ghana, to think that I was bastardizing, excuse my language, their food and appropriating it. I needed to get some license, some currency for myself, to be able to understand what was possible, what I could do with it and how I could interpret it.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Having three different women, so my grandmother's housekeeper, my Aunt Evelyn and my grandmother, all had three different recipes for jollof. Just that moment there, of having these three different women from three different tribes, cook it slightly differently but each have an absolute assurance that that was how you make jollof was interesting because there was nuance to be had between households. What is traditional is one household can be slightly different to what is traditional in another household, so that gave me some currency and some license.
Zoe Adjonyoh: And then, the other part was my dad mostly didn't use very fresh ingredients when he cooked. You know, it was tinned tomatoes, tinned sardines, tinned pilchards, tinned this, that and the other. I had this wonderful surprise when I was in Ghana, in Accra and in the surrounding areas, of noticing the abundance of fresh ingredients, the variety and abundance of herbs and spices that were available. I was overwhelmed by the variety, for example, of seafood, and things like squid and octopus, and all these ... I guess, in my mind at the time, very Western gazing ingredients were actually abundant in Ghana as well.
Zoe Adjonyoh: I was learning all these different types of ways and styles of cooking, learning about the abundance of fresh ingredients, and then having this extra knowledge on the nuance available as it regards what is traditional. That really gave me the license to be able to come back and confidence and be like, "Right, all of these ingredients are Ghanaian ingredients. How about if we reconfigure them like this, what does this look like, what does this taste like? And, is this still Ghanaian?" Yes it is, but it's new.
Zoe Adjonyoh: That trip was very edifying on lots of levels. And, I got to connect with my family after a very long time.
Suzy Chase: I read somewhere that you got there and they assumed you couldn't make Ghanaian food.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Yeah. Assumed I couldn't cook, full stop. Yeah, there was lot of assumptions.
Zoe Adjonyoh: I'll tell you the story, this anecdote. I'm mixed race so I'm light skinned, and in Ghana, that makes you oburoni. If you're not from Ghana, you're foreign. Which is an interesting thing because when you go back to somewhere, because that's where you consider home, and then you're considered a foreigner, it's an interesting dichotomy to be in. But, there it was and there it is so there's that. And, I'm an out queer woman, who's very outspoken.
Zoe Adjonyoh: There was a lot of me that there might not be for them to like, there's a lot of me that clashes with what is traditional Ghanaian culture. I was worried about all those things. And also, I was worried about ... I didn't want the pressure of them knowing that I ran a food business in the UK. By which time, incidentally, it was already quite well known and in the press a great deal. But, I didn't want to be put under any pressure about it so I didn't tell them what I did for living until I absolutely had to.
Zoe Adjonyoh: When the conversation came up, it was because I'd been to the market with my Aunt Evelyn in Kaneshie, there's a little anecdote about this in the book. Where she takes me to Kaneshie Market to go shopping and we're going to make nkatenkwan, which is the Twi word for ground nut soup, which is the mother name of peanut butter stew, which is how I grew up calling that dish just because of the sheer amount of peanut butter that went into it. We were preparing this dish and she was preparing it in a very quasi-traditional way. In it, it had blue crab, it had land snails, it had goat, it had mackerel. It was a real surf-and-turf version of the dish. Very different to how I would prepare it at home.
Zoe Adjonyoh: While I was talking to her in the process of preparing this, it came up that I was familiar ... She was confused about how I knew the names of so many ingredients and all of this. They were really, really [crosstalk 00:10:20].
Suzy Chase: That's so funny.
Zoe Adjonyoh: I know. They were really surprised that A, I knew what the ingredients were. B, that I had a handle on how to prepare and cook them. And C, that I could get a hold of them in the UK. They were really puzzled that any of these things would be available.
Zoe Adjonyoh: So then, I went from being embarrassed about wanting to talk about it, to being overly ego driven because then I was like, "Well actually, yada, yada." I was trying to make it sound really grand. And then my uncle was like, "Oh, so you do catering?" It really cut me down to size about what it was I was doing. I was like, "Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's what I do."
Zoe Adjonyoh: But then, we all ate this meal and obviously I was incredibly nervous. Yeah, they loved it. They were very surprised by how well I made the dish. I got the ultimate compliment when my grandmother called it "very tasteful." That was like wow, that is it. Who needs a Michelin star? Grandma says it's very tasteful. That was the challenge I wasn't expecting.
Suzy Chase: So last weekend, I made the recipe for light soup with chicken on page 129. How do you pronounce it?
Zoe Adjonyoh: Nkrakra. It's almost like silent K, but you have to get it in there. I am not the best person at speaking Twi or Fante. My dialects are necessarily the best and I have this terrible Southeast accent that loves to murder most words. But yeah, nkrakra.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. N-K-R-A-K-R-A. Okay, so that's on page 129. The chalé sauce, which is on page 247, goes into the soup. That is life changing.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Oh, yay! On board with the chalé sauce. Yeah.
Suzy Chase: It's the holy trinity in Ghanaian cuisine. Chalé means friend, which I love.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Nkrakra is one of those dishes I love because it's really easy for everybody to relate to because every culture has a version of this. You think of chicken soup for the soul, everybody has a broth, a chicken based broth that's healing, and nourishing and delicious, and this is that.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Chalé sauce is my own invention because what I noticed was there's this certain set of ingredients that crop up, over and over again, when you're cooking stews, and soups and things like that. I thought, "Why don't we just combine these into a thing and just call it chalé sauce?" Especially for this cookbook because I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people. Don't forget, I was writing it in 2013, 2014 so people really didn't have a relationship with this food then, outside of the diaspora. Chalé sauce is that wonderful thing, because it blends the trinity as you say, that ginger, the onion and the heat, with the components of the sauce, which is pepper and tomatoes. It's really handy.
Zoe Adjonyoh: It's called chalé sauce because the word chalé means friend, or pal, or mate or buddy. But also, because my dad is called Charles. His friends used to call him Chalé, which for some reason, when I was a kid, used to bug me. I used to think, "Why don't they call him by his name?" Because I thought his name was really important and proper. His friends used to call up looking for Chalé, I thought. But actually what they were saying was, "Hey, chalé." They're just saying, "Hey, friend," but I didn't know. I didn't realize that until a long time after I went back to Ghana.
Zoe Adjonyoh: I thought it would be fun to call that combination of ingredients chalé sauce, because it's just a really friendly, easy sauce to make. Not only is it brilliant for, as I said, all of the soups and stews that go on in this book. But in terms of bringing Ghanaian flavor into other things, which is what I'm really passionate about, is how do we get people to enjoy the flavors and ingredients outside of Ghanaian cooking. It does that because it's the kind of sauce ... We use it all the time, when we're making meatballs or moussaka, or lasagna. Any time you want to just zhuzh up something that's usually a little bit bland, add that sauce instead of your normal tomato sauce and you've just lifted your game 110%. Yeah, chalé sauce, one of my favorite things in here.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party, where I ask you who you would most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why. For this segment, it can only be one person.
Zoe Adjonyoh: That is hard. One person to my dinner party. I'm going to bring my grandmother back because she passed away last year. Cecilia, I'd have her back to have a meal with me. Discuss in detail what my father was like as a child, I'm still very curious about him. I definitely neglected spending enough time with my grandmother and speaking to her. Yeah, grandma.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web, and social media, and Spotify, and your online shop, and all the things?
Zoe Adjonyoh: The website is zoesghanakitchen.com. And then on social media, I'm mostly active @zoeadjonyoh, @ghanakitchen, but also the same on Twitter or anywhere else really. And, I have a podcast, Cooking Up Consciousness, you can find that on Spotify. You can find the playlist, Zoe's Ghana Kitchen, on Spotify. There is a soundtrack to cook to and a soundtrack to eat to.
Zoe Adjonyoh: And then, I'm editing a new book, a collection of food writing, of international people of color writing on food. You can check that out unbounders.co.uk. I'm basically everywhere on the internet.
Suzy Chase: I know. Just open your browser and Zoe will pop up.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Zoe's Ghana Kitchen and support the podcast, head on over to CookerybytheBook.com. Thanks, Zoe, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.
Zoe Adjonyoh: Thank you so much for having me, it's been a lovely conversation.
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