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INTRODUCTIONS

FROM BRISBANE (CA) TO ACCRA — FRAN’S STORY

This cookbook is the one I always wanted to buy and could never find. It is the one I wanted for myself first, and later for my mom, sisters, children, friends, and colleagues—at home, school, work, in my community, and beyond. It is the distillation of decades of living with a foot in two worlds—the United States, where I was born and grew up, and Ghana, my husband’s homeland, and now my adopted country, too.

Let me back up.

In 1957, when I was eight years old and living in California, Great Britain’s West African colony the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first black African country to achieve its independence from a colonial power. At that time, my family was a typical American family blended from immigrants, with a Norwegian grandfather on one side and Appalachian mountain folk on the other. My parents had met in Virginia where my Montana-born dad was stationed in the navy and Appalachian mom was working as a waitress. They moved west to live in Oregon for a few years and then moved south to the San Francisco Bay area in California when I was two. By 1957 I was growing up oblivious to distant Africa. The big news in Brisbane, California, was that Johnny Cash came to sing at the local barbecue restaurant.

Fast forward ten years. The youngest of three daughters, I left home on a scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. Over the next four years I fell in love with a brilliant fellow student from the new Ghana, Kwadwo (k-w-AH-j-oh) Osseo-Asare. He was orphaned, the eldest of four siblings. By my graduation we were discussing marriage. I knew I needed to travel alone to Ghana to find out what I would be getting myself into if we married, and also to reassure my parents (and by that time, step-parents as well) that we could successfully navigate a cross-cultural, cross-racial marriage. That difficult experience is chronicled in my first book, A New Land to Live In (InterVarsity Press, 1977).

After graduation in August 1971, I traveled alone to Ghana to spend a year getting acquainted with his country while he continued on to graduate school in Berkeley. I had only traveled on an airplane once before and was shy and uncertain of my reception. His “aunt” and what seemed like hundreds of relatives met me at the airport in Accra, the capital city. They threw their arms around me, exuberantly calling out “Akwaaba!” (ah-KWAH-ah-bah) which means “welcome” in the Akan language, and captures the essence of Ghana’s famed hospitality. In the same way, the delicious one-pots, soups, and stews I enjoyed in the homes of my new family and friends nurtured and welcomed me in a deeply soothing way. When the time came for me to re-create the meals I was learning to love, and that my husband-to-be had been raised on, my sisters-in-law-to-be and friends were willing to help me—and I was eager to learn.

Ghana and its food captivated me. At the end of my year there Kwadwo and I married in Ghana before returning to the U.S., where I entered a graduate program in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. Eventually we moved to Colorado, then on to Pennsylvania, and had two daughters and a son. I also spent the past four decades traveling back and forth between Ghana and the U.S., deepening my love affair with my husband’s homeland and its cuisine. Our children, too, have had the chance to live both in the United States and in Ghana. Along the way, I also returned to graduate school, this time to a doctoral program in rural sociology at Pennsylvania State University. I wanted to understand how Ghana, blessed with wonderful resources and a decent educational system, as well as creative and hardworking people, could be sliding into social, political, and economic decline.

When they were growing up and learning to cook, I could find no African cookbooks to help me teach my children, so I wrote my own, A Good Soup Attracts Chairs (Pelican Publishing Company, 1993). That cookbook also came in handy when we adopted two nephews from Ghana and brought them to live with us in the U.S. after their mother, my husband’s sister (and one of my earliest teachers), died.

I always longed for a definitive guide to cooking Ghanaian food, but felt unequal to the daunting task of authoring such a cookbook alone. One of the first African cookbooks I discovered was the African volume of the 1970 Time-Life series on Foods of the World (African Cooking), authored by Laurens van der Post. It included a full-page color photo of a young Barbara Baëta catering a buffet luncheon in Accra. She was described as “one of Ghana’s leading culinary experts,” who opened her catering service in 1968. According to the photo caption, “an invitation to one of her dinners is highly prized.” I then noticed the name Barbara Baëta reappearing in acknowledgments in books by other authors. I learned of Barbara’s famous company in Accra, Flair Catering Services, and discovered that she had authored some influential recipe cards in the 1970s. One day in the early 2000s, while lamenting to my husband that Barbara Baëta would be the ideal person to work with, he mentioned that he had gone to high school in Ghana (Achimota) with her brother Basil, a physician in Canada. How did I not know that?

We promptly made a trip to see him, and left a copy of my Ghanaian primer A Good Soup Attracts Chairs to give to his sister when she next visited. A year later Barbara and I arranged to meet face-to-face. We were instantly at ease with one another. She shared that she had tried several of the recipes in my book and they were very good. She also mentioned that people were always asking her to write a cookbook, but she was too busy and not really one to sit down and write. She invited me to spend time at her school and catering company to explore collaboration. I spent several weeks at Flair in 2002 and received a grant from the International Association of Culinary Professionals in 2004 to visit again, as well as to travel throughout the regions of Ghana gathering information for our book. I have made innumerable additional visits to Ghana and Flair since then.

A surprise along my journey was the meshing of my personal and professional interests. The more deeply I researched sub-Saharan African cuisines in general (and Ghana’s in particular) the more I became aware of a need for more information about sub-Saharan African cuisine and gastronomy. Despite the welcome explosion of writing and blogging and “YouTubing” about African cuisines, it is sometimes accompanied by naiveté and an uncritical embrace of ingredients and techniques, as well as a lack of information to help translate the cooking from a local, indigenous context to an international one.

Thus the nature of this book has broadened to include not just anecdotes about personal experiences, but information and photos to help place the recipes in context and give detailed instructions to “fill in the blanks.”

However, before diving into recipes, let me introduce Barbara.

FROM GHANA WITH LOVE—BARBARA’S STORY

Barbara Baëta, also known as Amesika Barbara Rose Baëta and fondly called “Auntie Sika” by family and friends, is a beloved national treasure of Ghana.

One of the country’s first internationally and formally trained hospitality industry professionals, Barbara has cooked for every head of state of Ghana since it became the first black African country to receive independence in 1957 (Kwame Nkrumah through current President John Mahama, whose wife, incidentally, is a graduate of Flair Catering Services). The list of dignitaries she has served reads like a global who’s who; Flair prepared the one state meal served to President Barack Obama and his family during their July 2009 trip to Ghana. She remembers fondly preparing other state meals for well-known figures such as Jimmy Carter, Queen Elizabeth II, U Thant, the Prince of Wales, Emperor Haile Selassie, President Thabo Mbeki, and the Sultan of Brunei.

Barbara comes from a distinguished family. A member of the Ewe ethnic group, she is descended from royalty. Her paternal great-great-great grandfather sailed from Portugal to West Africa to buy rubber and gold, married a Ghanaian king’s daughter from Keta, and stayed. For her years of support to her community of Anloga in the Keta District of the Volta region, Barbara was made an honorary “Queen Mother” with the royal name of “Mama Hogbe.” Her family represents a global melting pot: a great-great-grandmother was the daughter of a Danish man who came to build the fort along the coast and a local Ghanaian woman. The original Baëta brother who came to Ghana also plied his trade in Brazil. There he and other family members mixed with and acquired Brazilian relatives.

Outstanding men and strong, pioneering, independent women characterize Barbara’s family. Her grandmother braved the scorn of the local mission middle school headmaster to become the first girl admitted to the Keta middle school. (He disdainfully asked: “What do you want here … All the learning you will ever need is to be able to do sums about chickens [koko-kunta, i.e., chicken arithmetic], and that you can do already.”²) This same grandmother became a teacher and at age eighteen founded the YWCA in Keta in the then Gold Coast. An aunt, Annie Baëta Jiagge, became Ghana’s second woman lawyer and first female Appeal Court judge. Barbara’s father, Rev. Prof. Emeritus Christian Baëta, was a world-renowned theologian who taught at the Department of Religion at the University of Ghana, Legon.

The eldest of five children, including a sister and three brothers, Barbara herself has always accepted responsibility for looking after and nurturing them and others. She continues to do so, seamlessly combining her personal and professional lives.

At around age four or five, Barbara Baëta began spending holidays at her grandmother’s farm at Aflao, near the Ghana-Togo border. She helped cook, learned to make bread, and learned to sew. She looked forward to the visits and they instilled in her a lifelong love of cooking and a fascination with fashion and design.

As she grew from a five-year-old playing under the coconut trees, she pursued her interest in food and the hospitality industry, both academically and practically. After attending the prestigious Achimota Secondary School, she furthered her education in hotel and institutional management at the Huyton College for Girls in Liverpool, England, then at Glascow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science, returning to Ghana in January 1960.

She became Director of Food Services and Hostels at the YMCA in Accra. In 1964 while still in her twenties, Barbara was awarded a technical aid 18-month scholarship by the Canadian government to study large-scale food management and interior decoration with top institutions and individuals across Canada. By 1967 Ghana’s government appointed her Ghana’s official hostess to the 1967 World Expo (the World’s Fair held in Montreal that year), and she prepared a Ghanaian banquet for 500 people, renting the equipment and staff she needed, and bringing Ghanaian ingredients with her. She returned to her work at the YMCA, but after a year announced to her parents, “Look, if I can go to Canada and do this kind of function for 500 people by myself, why am I still working for somebody?” Her experience gave Barbara the confidence to establish her own business, borrowing about $200 from Barclays Bank and insisting on doing it by herself.

Before leaving Canada after the Expo, she had dinner with some friends, and announced her aspirations: “I’m going home. I want to start my own business. I want something with F for food, fashion, and flowers. Find me a name.” One of her friends thought a while and said “But Barbara, you always do everything with flair anyway.” Bingo. “Flair Catering Services” was established in 1968, and has always been distinguished by its sophisticated and quality preparation and presentation of Ghanaian traditional dishes as well as cuisines from other countries. Barbara also established the nonprofit Flair Vocational Training Institute to help equip young people, especially young girls, with marketable skills in the hospitality industry. Over 1,500 young people from throughout Africa have been trained through her institute’s efforts.

Barbara exudes Ghana’s famed hospitality and generosity. Her disarming smile, humility, and infectious joy and optimism draw even strangers to her and make them feel special and welcome. In 2011 President Mills awarded her one of Ghana’s highest medals, the Order of the Volta, for distinguished service to the nation. A deep spirituality and sense of gratitude, coupled with boundless energy, sparkling creativity and belief in the value of hard work make her an inspiration to those around her. I can scarcely remember sitting around her generous dining room table without a host of family and visitors welcomed there.

However, hers is a tough love that has been tested during some dark days in Ghana. She defiantly closed her successful Accra restaurant, The Calabash, after military personnel began “bullying their way through, thinking they could come in and eat free.” She escaped by seconds being caught in the crossfire of a 1966 coup when she was the last person to leave the Ghana Broadcasting Company after cleaning up from filming a cooking show. She has weathered food, water, and power shortages, political and economic instability, and social upheaval with persistence and an unshakable confidence in the goodness of God. In short, Barbara epitomizes the “can do” attitude (what I call “betumi”) now recognized as a key ingredient for successful development anywhere.

Barbara decided early on to keep her company small enough that she could know and supervise her employees personally (several dozen now), and be close to the fifty or so students who attend her catering school each year. This was a conscious decision not to expand into a huge business, but to remain a small efficient one.

Long before “culinary tourism” became an official term, Barbara was regularly traveling to England, France, and North America with her staff and students, exposing them to international standards in the tourism industry while promoting Ghana’s cuisine and fashion with her signature “From Ghana with Love” extravaganzas. She could raise many thousands of dollars in a single night while showcasing Ghanaian fashion designers, floral arrangements, and foods. An advocate and role model for women’s rights, she has long been an active member of the professional women’s group Zonta International.

Now in her seventies, Barbara shows few signs of slowing down. She recently single-handedly began a campaign to upgrade food safety and sanitation skills in Ghana’s informal and semi-formal hospitality industry. She has begun by organizing courses that are being expanded to include more sites, and is hopeful that it will soon be possible to establish a nationwide certification program. In characteristic giving fashion she welcomes this opportunity to share her culinary expertise and stories with a larger audience. She has also recently broken ground on a new site and embarked on fulfilling a life-long dream: to expand her current catering school into an African Culinary Institute, capable of educating students to prepare not only Ghana’s regional specialties and Asian and Western dishes, but eventually highlighting regional food from across sub-Saharan Africa, from west to east to south.

² Crane, Louise. Ms. Africa: Profiles of Modern African Women, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1973, p. 16.

INTRODUCING GHANA

Ghana is vibrant and intensely alive. Its essence is difficult to capture, for it is a collage of innumerable constantly shifting sights and sounds and smells:

• Fishermen straining and singing in tune with the rhythm of the waves as they stand on the sand along coconut tree-lined coasts and pull in nets

• Wooden pestles rhythmically thumping in wooden mortars, pounding boiled cassava and plantain or African yams into fufu while skillful hands turn the dough

• Flutes, drums, keyboards, electric guitars moving bodies and feet and voices in fields, churches, and nightclubs, day and night

• Vendors streaming along streets gracefully balancing heavy loads on their heads or calling out and waving phone cards, plastic bags of plantain chips, peanuts, tiger nuts, whole pineapples, dish towels, sunglasses, dog chains, CDs, chewing gum, green South African apples, chocolate bars, newspapers and magazines, soccer balls, etc., etc. … a constantly moving roadside market passing by car windows

• Neatly stacked peeled oranges and coconuts ready to quench thirst

• Smiling children eating sweet mangos with juice dripping down their arms

• Fashionable young women in bright, dramatic outfits and high heels with elaborate hairstyles smartly moving between offices and shops

• Musical laughter and loud voices everywhere

• Constant construction, with cement and glass skyscrapers and malls and restaurants and overpasses and freeways popping up everywhere (sometimes clogging roads and drains and straining water and electrical systems)

• Gorgeous textiles, classic and new

• A hopeful, youthful energy in the air, fueled by investors, oil, and the “African maker” movement

• New technology everywhere—cars, computers, notebooks, i-pads, and ubiquitous cell phones

• The faithful kneeling on prayer mats or chanting

• Opulent gold jewelry and huge, dramatic umbrellas and pomp displayed at durbars with kings and attendants sitting in glory

• In the north, cattle grazing, vegetables and yam slices drying in the sun, skilled leatherwork and woven fabrics, mosques, distinctive round mud-walled architecture, colorful woven Bolga baskets

• Rivers and lakes, tropical rainforest, elephants and crocodiles, red dusty lateritic soil, Guinea fowl along roads and fields, roosters crowing

• A swirling mix of peoples, national and international: Ga, Akan, Dagbani Ewe, Fanti, American, Nigerian, Indian, European, Syrian, Chinese …

In 1957, at the time of independence, the “Gold Coast” renamed itself after the ancient wealthy West African medieval kingdom of Ghana famous for its gold. The Republic of Ghana is over 92,000 square miles, making it slightly smaller than Oregon, my home state. In the center of West Africa’s coast, Ghana’s southern coast borders the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Its other borders include Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) on the east, Togo on the west, and Burkina Faso to the north. Coastal Accra is the capital city.

Tropical Ghana lies just a few degrees above the equator, and about 4 percent of the land remains tropical rainforest, about 20 percent is semi-deciduous forest, and there are savannah lands along the coast and in the north, plus transitional zones. The Eastern Region is home to the Akwapim-Togo hills.

Ghana’s youthful and rapidly growing population numbers over 26 million people (compared to about 4 million in Oregon). Up to two-thirds of the people are involved in agriculture and animal husbandry in the formal or informal sector. Crops vary with the climate and geography among the ten administrative regions in the country, which are historically loosely affiliated with ethnic groups (i.e., Ewe speakers in the Volta Region, Fanti speakers in the Western Region, Twi speakers in the Ashanti Region, etc.).

The land is crisscrossed with rivers, especially dominated by the Volta River (the Black Volta and White Volta and their convergence), its tributaries, and Volta Lake, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. Fresh and salt-water fish and shellfish from the coast and inland are an important part of the diet, often smoked, salted, and/or dried to preserve them.

Crops include maize (corn), cassava, pepper, plantain, okra, yam, tomato, cocoyam, peanut, leafy vegetables, oil palm, beans and pulses, millet, sorghum, cocoa, rice, banana, papaya, eggplant (garden egg), oranges, pineapple, avocado, mango, sheanut, onion, coconut, cashew, cotton, colanut, sugarcane, lime/lemon, ginger, along with other fruits, vegetables, and staples.

Cattle are raised in the hotter, drier north away from the tsetse flies that transmit animal trypanosomiasis and prevent cattle from thriving elsewhere. Guinea fowl also run wild there. While goat, mutton, pork, and poultry are more prevalent in northern Ghana, in the more central Eastern and Brong Ahafo forested regions cocoa, red palm, and plantain trees thrive, and bush meat like grasscutter (aka, “greater cane rat”) has long been a delicacy, along with seasonal mushrooms and giant land snails. Palm trees line coastal areas.

The many languages spoken in Ghana pose a research challenge when writing about foods and ingredients. For example, people may say they use kakadro (Twi), kakatsofa (Ga), gometakui or nkraosa (Ewe), or kakaduro (Hausa) when referring to “ginger.” The spice Xylopica aethiopica is known as hwentia in Twi, but etso in Ewe and so in Ga. And sometimes a generic word like shito or mako may refer to one of any of a variety of peppers, or to a condiment. Okra soup is nkruma nkwan in Twi but enmomi wonu in Ga, and fetri detsi in Ewe. When featuring regional dishes in this book, their local name is sometimes indicated.

Pronunciation Note: In the local names, “ɔ” is pronounced like the “ou” in “ought” and “ε” is pronounced like the “e” in “set.”