To Boston-area Africans, native foods taste like home

ARLINGTON -- The words come out in an excited blur when Yar Ayuel talks about her Sudanese cooking. She tells of molakia, a slightly bitter green from the jute plant, which she buys in a shop in Haymarket and cooks with bouillon, onion, garlic, cumin, and jalapeno. "Sometimes I make it real hot," she says, smiling delightedly.

It goes with beef or goat stew, says Ayuel, a young mother who is studying biology at Pine Manor College. As her son, 14-month-old Deng, sleeps in another room, she talks about foods she remembers from her childhood in southern Sudan. In her apartment here, she bakes a thin, flat bread made with cornmeal and wheat flour, cooks it on a griddle, and serves the bread with carrots, collards, and other vegetables. It "brings memories of my country back alive," says Ayuel, who spent years as a refugee after civil wars split her family and her father was killed.

Native foods remind people like Ayuel of home. Dishes from the vast African continent may sound exotic, but many ingredients and even cooking methods have influenced our cuisines -- from the use of chilies to peanut sauces to the ubiquitous pita bread and its spinoffs. Africans living in the Boston area go to great lengths to find them.

Customers at the African Cuisine restaurant in Hyde Park can order dishes from their West African homelands. Some come for the foods of their individual tribes, says owner Roy Ude. "Certain West Africans only come here for 'draw' soup," says the Nigerian-born Ude. "Draw" means the soups are served with fufu, a dumpling of pounded yams or cassava. When the dumpling is dipped into the soup, he explains, the liquid in the bowl is drawn up by the starchy dumpling, hence the "draw." Fufu has to be made to order, says the restaurateur, or it won't taste right. Draw soups include euguzi, a melon seed and spinach soup, and ogbonno , made with dried shrimp and plenty of hot red pepper. They're all listed on a card over the restaurant's bar.

Another favorite dish is a stew called pepper soup, which combines goat meat and plenty of chilies and other spices. It's reputed to ward off colds. The little restaurant specializes in Nigerian cuisine, but also serves Liberian and Sierra Leone dishes on weekends, when Ude has cooks in the kitchen from those regions.

Rice is the staple all across Africa, says Ude, a consulting engineer who opened the restaurant three years ago with his late wife and his daughter, Nnenna, who juggles restaurant work with graduate studies in biology at Harvard. His cooks make jollof, a well-known West African rice dish, with a tomato-based sauce, curry, and sweet red peppers. "It looks by appearance like Chinese rice," says Ude.

The menu boasts some unusual ingredients, such as cow's feet and Congo meat ( snails). The "must-have," says Ude, is stockfish, which is salted white fish imported from Iceland or Norway. The craze for dried cod, also called salt cod, swept Nigeria in the middle of the last century, when African businessmen began importing stockfish after eating it in Scandinavia. Ude brings the salted fish in by the bale -- about 100 pounds each -- using the fish at the restaurant and selling some. "A typical Nigerian family cannot do without it," Ude says. On a weekend night, customers who line the bar are eating seasoned and braised stockfish and drinking favorite African beers from their own region.

When they open their Ugandan restaurant in Waltham in January, business partners Hassan Sekabira and Hassan Lubega are counting on loyal East African customers to fill their tables. Sekabira says that the 50-seat spot, called Karibu, which now only offers catering, will feature the "grandma" recipes from his partner's mother-in-law. Her sambusas -- fried meat pies similar to Indian samosas -- are already famous, he says, for their "secret" spice mixtures. Also on the menu will be plantain dishes spiced with curry; a fried rice dish called pilawo with lamb, beef, or goat; and chapatis that are "grilled like a pizza." Karibu tea, similar to a spiced chai brew, already has fans. "My landlord says he can't do without it," says Sekabira.

Translating African food to America takes some doing, beyond locating special ingredients, says Rose Ake, who has a master's in public health and works in women and infants' care at Brigham & Women's Hospital. The Brighton resident, who is from Cameroon, makes traditional African food for celebrations. On ordinary days, she has found she has to cut back on starches, and is careful to limit frying the plantains she loves. At home, she says, Africans don't eat butter or cheese and "they're always moving around." She says that walking 24 hours to get to another village isn't unusual.

Ake makes a stew of meat, tomatoes, and peanuts, called groundnuts in West Africa. Although peanut butter can be used, she prefers to toast the nuts and then boil them before pulverizing them into a paste to thicken the stew. Some flavors are difficult to reproduce here, she says, because in Africa everyone has bitter herbs in their yards to use in cooking. Although a powdered form is available in shops, it's not quite the same.

Still, when Ake brings her fried plantains and saucy beans to gatherings, she says, they're very popular. She and her sister, Mary Ann Fomunyoh, who lives in Washington, D.C., make their West African dishes to mix with other fare at parties here.

"All the Americans want to eat the African food," says Ake. With the continent's array of flavors and tastes, Americans have a lot of catching up to do.