Meal 57: Estonia
Vikings, Russians, Swedes, Poles, Russians, Germans, Soviets… pretty much, if you were an empire within a few hundred kilometers of Estonia, you probably had dominion over this small country at some point. But things are now going well for the Estonians, who emerged from the USSR with a bang, and now enjoy a strong economy, EU membership, strong civil liberties, and Internet access so pervasive they have online voting. (Thankfully this made finding recipes a lot easier than expected!) Estonia’s ...
Meal 47: Democratic Republic of the Congo
What a special night! 75 guests, most of whom had never been to a Nosh before, gathered in the beautiful ballroom at Hostelling International on the Upper West Side, for a meal of classic Congolese dishes. The idea came from Ari, the community engagement manager at the hostel, who saw our email on The Listserve and reached out to see if we might want to do a Nosh with them. With a big venue and kitchen, we decided to align ...
Meal 34: Chad
Chad spans the three S’s of the heart of Africa: the Sahara desert in the north, the arid Sahel in the middle, and the wetter savanna to the south. Or put into culinary terms, this extent is why we see both dates and peanuts factor into this meal. However, on the heels of the generically-named Central African Republic, Chad’s another country that poses some online searching problems, at least in English. To wit, I was looking for advice on cooking ...
Meal 31: Cameroon
For our first Nosh in DC, we teamed up with WFP USA to host the biggest yet, with over 25 people — just about none of whom Laura or I had ever met! — coming to experience a Cameroonean feast meal. It was quite the affair, with a buffet line, speeches before and after, a Q&A with our guests, a slideshow of prior Noshes, and a really powerful video about the amazing work WFP does that we hope to put ...
Meal 28: Burkina Faso
Our plans took us to Cambridge, MA this weekend, so for the third time, we took United Noshes on the road. This week was Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African former French colony, and I was not terribly confident that we’d find the proper ingredients in the Boston area, given that it’s not very easy in New York. But lo and behold, the Tropical Foods market in Roxbury had just about everything, including sumbala seeds and fermented cornflour. Heck, they ...
Meal 27: Burundi
Starting with Burundi, six of the next eight countries alphabetically are African. I suspect I’m going to get to know some of the shop owners up around Franklin and Fulton, which is the best area I’ve found for the various starches, oils, greens, and other distinctly African ingredients that you just don’t find in the supermarket. That said, it’s amazing what you can find in supermarkets in Brooklyn, such as goat! But the one thing I couldn’t find anywhere was ...
Meal 23: Botswana
We were super fortunate to have a Botswanan on hand! Ssebbaale, from the north of this large but sparsely populated country in southern Africa, is a colleague of previous nosher Jessica. Not only did he share recipes before coming — which was very helpful since there’s precious little online in the way of Botswanan recipes — but he also brought spices he’d recently picked up back home. And those spices made all the difference in giving the dishes a lovely, ...
Week 20: Benin
Benin, on the West African coast next to Nigeria, was formerly known as Dahomey, after a fearsome warrior kingdom that for a few centuries would sell captives to European slave traders. The countless souls passing through on their way to the Americas brought many foods with them, such as yams, okra, and peanuts, and many people from the Caribbean islands where they landed now live in Brooklyn. Thus, due to a long, strange path of history, I didn’t have to ...
Week 15: Barbados
Barbados is forever connected to rum — they’ve been making it there for over three hundred years, probably for nearly as long as it was a British sugar plantation colony. So because given this was our third Caribbean meal, and perhaps because the previous two countries were Muslim, I focused a bit more on the drinking side of things, making two drinks from scratch that are classically Bajan (BAH-zhun, the colloquial term for Barbadian). Our guests tonight were Elly, her ...
Week 5: Angola
What’s stewed and tasty and red all over? Angolan food! Just about everything tonight was drenched in highly saturated, boldly colored, and distinctly strong and nutty-tasting red palm oil. This was the first meal that required venturing out of my normal shopping sphere. I found the red palm oil, palmnut concentrate, and cassava flour for the meal at an African market at Franklin and Fulton, which had very few items I’d ever seen before, but will probably get familiar with ...