Duval Timothy - Food from Across Africa : Recipes to Share

Contents

Family in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Sudan connect us to Africa, though south London is the landscape that brings us together. It provides the markets where we shop and the spaces where we host our dinners. Its the place we call home.

Looking back, we didnt think twice before launching The Groundnut. It was the perfect thing to pursue at that moment in time. This book is a retrospective that represents the first nine menus we came up with and the history behind the recipes. Even the very simplest dish underwent hours of deliberation for an event, and then again, to make it into this book.

We aim to make food that is simple, balanced, beautiful and fundamentally to share.

In January 2012 we started a bimonthly supper club called The Groundnut. The evenings featured the food of our childhoods, especially our heritage in West and East Africa. The aim we had in mind was to draw attention to traditional recipes, both inherited and adapted, as well as to explore new ingredients and combinations. African food is some of the best on the planet. It is easily shopped for and cooked, yet remains for some reason off the culinary radar of most people in Britain. We want to change that.

Each evening our thirty-four guests are welcomed with a cocktail and plantain crisps, followed by a relaxed multiple-course meal. We change the menu from event to event, but in our repertoire are any number of classic African dishes, many of which have been passed down through generations: from the fragrant and ubiquitous West African dish, jollof rice, to innovative modern offerings like our aromatic star anise and coconut chicken served in a steaming plantain leaf.

All the evenings in 2012 were hosted on two long tables in the beautiful St. Johns Hall, an eighteenth-century registered landmark building near Tower Bridge and one of the few remaining watch houses in the country. In July 2013 we hosted over 200 people over seven days in a South London gallery space, Lewisham Arthouse, and our evenings at Le Bal Caf in Paris filled up just a week after tickets were made available. We have since returned for another run at Lewisham Arthouse, and hosted periodic events out of our studio in Deptford while developing the recipes for this book. The venture is self-financed and every evening up until now has sold out completely.

After two years of putting on these public events we have identified demand, great support, and incredible curiosity about the food we make and the way we present it. Initially we sold tickets predominantly to family and friends but along the way we have accumulated a lengthy mailing list, and some loyal customers.

Collectively we have spent time living, working, and visiting family in Africain the Southeast, Swaziland to South Sudan, and in the West, predominantly Sierra Leone and Nigeriaalthough for many years we have been based in South London. It is where we all met, where we all live, and where The Groundnut went from being an idea discussed around our kitchen tables to being a fully formed and successful enterprise. The local markets in Deptford, Brixton, East Street, and Lewisham are also where we shop for the majority of our ingredients.

We want to introduce new foods and explain where and how to source them. We expect to present ways of eating that people may not have previously experienced and to change the way that commonly available ingredients are approached, in such a way that the possibilities when undertaking a weekly shop will expand inestimably.

Our food is communal in the sense that a lot of it is prepared with sharing in mind. At our evenings, food is distributed banquet style: in big dishes passed down tables, in edible bowls, or wrapped in plantain leaves that guests have to delicately unfurl. Our food encourages tactility, with influences from our childhoods growing up eating freshly picked mangoes sprinkled with salty chili powder, being served juice in a peeled, cored, and squeezed orange and hand rolling and dunking balls of eba into okra soup then straight into your mouth.

The food is associative in the way that our recipes fit together, and interact with one another in menus. Instead of making explicit distinction by chapters between starters, mains, and desserts we have structured the book by menus to represent the way that dishes fit together, whether attached by season, dominant flavors, or by another unifying point of inspiration.

Soon after deciding to embark on The Groundnut, we went on holiday to Vienna for our friend Deniss birthday. Staying at the Kabwas family home, with Mama cooking for us, was emotional, and the food, music, and company created a beautiful atmosphere around the table. It was a timely reminder of why we were about to share the food of Sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora. After two rounds of hugs, we returned to London with inspiration and plum brandy.

We announced dates for our first dinners and instantly spent most of the money wed invested in cutlery. At that point we knew there was no going back. If we hadnt had to pay for those knives, forks, and spoons, who knows what we would have been up to now. Were hoping they will start to turn a profit sometime soon.

Yemi travelled to Nigeria, and when he returned, preparations got intense. Perhaps the most important things we needed were tables. Roughly a year beforehand I had taken one of my large paintings off the wall in the flat and used it as a tabletop for a dinner with friends. It worked surprisingly well, so I was confident we could design and build our own tables. The wooden table tops were stretched tightly with red felt fabric. For each subsequent set of dinners we would restretch them with a different-colored fabric in relation to the theme of the dinner, the space, and our food. The color of the tables quickly became an important factor in determining the mood in the evening.