• For staff
  • For Staff
  • Services A-Z
  • Student Education Service
  • For students
  • Portal
  • Mobile app
  • For Students
  • Faculties
  • Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures
  • Faculty of Biological Sciences
  • Faculty of Business
  • Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences
  • Faculty of Environment
  • Faculty of Medicine and Health
  • Faculty of Social Sciences
  • Lifelong Learning Centre
  • Language Centre
  • Other
  • Staff A-Z
  • Campus map
  • Jobs
  • Alumni
  • Contacts
  • Library
  • IT
  • VideoLeeds
  • Leeds University Union
  • Follow us
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • Medium
  • Weibo
  • The Conversation
  • RSS news feed
University of Leeds logo
Centre for African Studies (LUCAS)
  • Home
  • About
  • People
  • Schools Project
  • Bulletin
  • Study Africa
  • YASN
  • News
  • Events
  • Resources
  • Home
  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin
  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 73 (2011/12)
  • Article

In this Issue

Analysing Africa

  • The Question of Insecurity in the Southern Cameroons Reunification Debate - Joseph Nfi

Reading Africa

  • Pleasure, Autonomy and the Myth of the Untouchable Body in Bessie Head’s Maru - Natasha Lloyd-Owen
  • Review of Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, Society and Politics - Lionel Cliffe
  • Review of Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice/ Making History in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe - Lionel Cliffe
  • Review of And Crocodiles Are Hungry At Night. A Memoir/ J P Clark. A Voyage / The Dennis Brutus Tapes. Essays at Autobiography - Martin Banham
  • Review of Mauritania: The Struggle for Democracy - Hannah Cross
  • Review of Circular Migration in Zimbabwe and Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa - Hannah Cross
  • Review of Africa’s Informal Workers: Collective Agency, Alliances and Transitional Organizing in Urban Africa - Anne Tallontire
  • Review of The African Diaspora and the Disciplines - Osita Okagbue
  • Review of Ethiopia: The Last two Frontiers - Jane Plastow
  • Review of Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta: Managing the Complex Politics of Petro-Violence - James Van Alstine
  • Review of Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam - Arthur Rose
  • Review of Peace versus Justice? The Dilemma of Transitional Justice in Africa - Kevin Ward
  • Review of Film in African Literature Today 28 - David Kerr
  • Review of Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland - Karen Cereso
  • Review of Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History - Vincent Hiribarren
  • Review of Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine - Lynette Hunter
  • Review of Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa - James Gibbs

Remembering Africa

  • In memory of Ulli Beier - Eckhard Breitinger
  • Chinua Achebe at Leeds: When the Great Share the Good - Brendon Nicholls

Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 73 (2011/12) Wednesday 4 May 2011

Review of Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine

By Lynette Hunter (University of California Davis)

Abstract

 

  • Article keywords:
  • cuisine
  • James C. McCann
  • Lynette Hunter
  • women

Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine. James C. McCann. Ohio University Press/ C. Hurst and Co., Ohio, 2010. Pp. 215. ISBN. 978-1-84904-0 36-5 (pb). £12.99.

Stirring the Pot is modestly practical and enormously ambitious at the same time. Perhaps it is this combination that makes it both an introductory and a knowledgeable work. It brings together a wealth of historical knowledge about the continent of Africa (largely excluding North Africa, the cuisines and food pathways of which have received considerable attention), focused around food production, storage, preparation and consumption. It also attends to the work of women in these activities, to the environmental contexts for the similarities and differences of the areas in which the writer chooses to find coherence, to the large scale performance of food in national definition, and to the detail of daily labour around food – to name but a few of the disciplinary areas invoked.

The book moves from an overview of the occurrence, introduction and movement of ingredients basic to today’s African food often from the ‘New World’ over the past 500 years, via the apparently anomalous constitution of food as a national cuisine in Ethiopia in the 1880s, to commonalities that re-draw Africa into West African groundnut stew and Jolloffe rice, the north-south central maize belt, and the east-south-west maritime coast plethora of traditions carried on the spice routes. It then returns to a few disaporic instances of African cookery in the ‘New World’. The prose is reflective, borne along by a series of narratives rather than arguments, in a prose that balances scholarly insight with cultural commentary.

McCann consistently foregrounds the labour of women in the conveying of cookery practices, although he makes no systematic attempt to compare gendered labour structures among the different communities and polities he studies. Yet the focus allows him to suggest that differences such as the existence of publically provided food from street-sellers or ‘restaurants’ in West Africa and the non-existence of such foodways in Ethiopia until the twentieth century, are part of the different social activity of women in these two areas. There is no analysis of the position of women or their familial structures that might help understand some of the transmission of the traditional knowledge they enact, yet the inclusion of passages such as Audrey Richards’ account of Bemba women preparing and cooking millet makes partially accessible aspects of the embodied knowledge that is so central to the world of food studies.

The book also draws attention to the complexity of the recipe, or ‘culinary text’ as McCann puts it, and worries about the loss that occurs between the tacit knowledge of the person who learns about cooking from observation and trial and error, and the often sparse written receipt that takes so much for granted. Yet one of the books riches is the inclusion of extensive texts: from those mined for information about Queen Taytu’s feast in 1887, to Margaret Field’s survey of ‘Gold Coast’ cooking, to the long list of insect recipes compiled by a group of European women in Malawi. The quotations are extensive, and the repetitions and rhythms allow the reader to begin to find grounds for understanding the cuisine. Indeed McCann argues that most of the evidence for culinary heritage is found in the ‘living transcripts of daily cooking’.

So much of the analysis is based on foodways established by colonialism and the modern civic notion of slavery, that the interaction of external countries with the development of African cuisine is proportionally sparse. McCann carefully acknowledges the existence of the slave trade, even at one point describing the balanced diet of a slave chattel ship as ‘economic’ rather than ‘humane’. Nevertheless, more could have been said, and places where stark comparisons appear without comment are difficult to decipher. The enormous influence of Latin American foods on African diet avoids direct discussion of health issues while pointing to them – for example by way of a photograph of what appears to be a health document on the ‘Nutritional value of cassava’ (virtually nil except for its calories), with little accompanying context. Perhaps this is the authorial style, intended to excise ‘judgmental’ statements. Perhaps it is one of the few ways this author could grasp issues that focus on food and cuisine in Africa, and keep the narrative under control. But it’s also the case that he doesn’t choose to foreground them in the epilogue’s suggestions for ‘questions that need asking’, and evades colonialism with the term ‘cosmopolitan’. There may be good reasons for this but they are not discussed.

The epilogue offers a good scan of existing sources in the field, and the bibliography is excellent. McCann has used a wide range of materials from histories, to novels, to social studies, invoking the transdisiplinary methodology of many food studies. When a writer attempts to open up a field it’s a necessary condition that not everything can be done. But this book does a lot of work, and is an eminently readable account that people from the public and academic worlds can turn to when generating new ways of thinking about African food and cuisine.

[Published in Leeds African Studies Bulletin 73 (December 2011), pp. 73-74]

  • Article Categories:
  • Reading Africa
  • © 2021 University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT
  • Terms and conditions
  • Copyright
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy and Cookies
  • Freedom of Information
  • Blog