Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria

This comprehensive look at Nigerian food traditions emphasizes the country’s geographic and cultural diversity, treating your interest seriously and rewarding you with an understanding of how people shop, cook, and eat in Africa’s most populous country.

Nigeria-born Ozoz Sokoh, who is both a food blogger and a professor of food and tourism, enriches her survey with extensive headnotes and sidebars discussing ingredients, how meals are composed, and distinctively Nigerian food classes such as chews and swallows: “Some people eat swallows with clean hands, others with cutlery. If eating by hand, it’s not uncommon to provide guests or elders with two ‘wash hand bowls’--one for washing with soap, and a second for rinsing with clean water–and napkins to dry their hands.”

While many dishes, like an archetypal Nigerian salad, can be made from ingredients commonly found in American markets, others will introduce you to the likes of toeshoot beans, a spice called ehuru or calabash nutmeg, toasted cassava granules called garri, and bonga, a smoked flat fish with gold-streaked skin.

We admire the way this book invites you to cook the way Nigerians cook.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.