Afia Amoako's Eat with Afia: West African Food With the Sources Attached
Afia Amoako of Eat with Afia, the Ghanaian Canadian writer behind a reference library for West African cooking. Photo courtesy of eatwithafia.com
Eat with Afia Ghanaian and West African cooking explained through culture, tradition and history eatwithafia.com
Somewhere in the English-speaking internet there is a dish called African peanut stew. It has no country. It has no people. It turns up on recipe sites with a photograph of something orange and a note that it is inspired by the flavours of Africa, and it has been doing this for years. Afia Amoako wrote a post about it with a title that leaves no room for negotiation: "African Peanut Stew" is NOT a real recipe.
Amoako is a Ghanaian Canadian writer in Toronto, and Eat with Afia is her platform for what she calls celebrating Ghanaian and West African food through culture, tradition and history. She is also a researcher by training, with a PhD in epidemiology and doctoral work on the uneven landscape of COVID-19 across the city of Toronto. That is not a biographical curiosity parked at the top of an about page. It is the method the whole site runs on.
Her complaint about the peanut stew is a specificity complaint, which is what an epidemiologist would say. There are real dishes it flattens, and she names them: maafe or domoda in Senegal, Mali, Gambia and Guinea, groundnut soup or nkatiekwan in Ghana, ndole in Cameroon, fumbwa and okok in Congo and Cameroon. Africa, she writes, is not a monolith and neither is our food. The ask that follows is modest and almost clerical. Say where the dish comes from.
The Sources Come With the Recipe
What makes Eat with Afia unusual is that she then holds herself to it. Her history of jollof rice does not begin with a claim, it begins with an attribution, to the Wolof peoples of the Senegambia area, of which the dish gets its name. From there she follows the thing outward along the trading reach of the Dyula, from the Senegambian coast to as far east as Niger, and downward into the botany, to African rice, Oryza glaberrima, one of only two rice species in the world and possibly a native of the Niger flood basin. The tomato arrives late and from elsewhere, as tomatoes always do. At the end of it all, asked who actually invented jollof, she declines to pick a winner. That is yet to be determined, she writes, which is a sentence food blogging almost never contains.
She is doing for West African cooking roughly what Ozoz Sokoh does for Nigerian food from a geologist's angle, reading a cuisine as a landscape with strata and origins rather than a menu, and what Maryam Jillani set out to do for Pakistan, building the reference work that should already have existed. As an academic, Amoako has said, she was trained not only to ask many questions but to use diverse sources to inform her understanding. The reading list under the jollof piece runs from a 1948 paper on the origins of the tomato to James McCann's Stirring the Pot, and it is there for the same reason it would be in a journal article, so that you can go and check.
Two Pieces Worth Exploring
Jollof Rice History: How A Dish Took Over West Africa
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Jollof Rice History How a Senegambian one-pot dish travelled a continent, told with the citations eatwithafia.com
The best demonstration of the method, on the one subject where West Africans will argue with you all night. Jollof is the poster child for West African food, and the internet version of its history is a set of competing national claims plus a charming fable about a Senegalese cook named Penda Mbaye. Amoako treats the fable as a fable, dates what can be dated, separates the rice from the tomato from the trade route, and leaves the origin question open where the evidence leaves it open. It is the rare food history post that is more interesting for what it refuses to assert.
What are Fermented Locust Beans (Iru/Dawadawa)
Afia Amoako
Fermented Locust Beans The Sahelian seasoning that goes by nine names, explained from the tree down eatwithafia.com
The other half of the site, the ingredient explained so thoroughly that you could go and buy some. Iru, ogiri, dadawa, nere, soumbala, netetou, kolgo, afiti, all one thing, the fermented seed of Parkia biglobosa, a tree of the Sahel. She walks through the production she learned in Tongo, in Ghana's Upper East: boil the seeds, pound them with sand to shed the shells, then ferment for two days with ash or millet, which is the step where the magic really happens. Then the science, Bacillus bacteria breaking protein into amino acids and ammonia and umami, in beans that are about a third protein by weight. Then where to buy it, and the warning that nothing works as a perfect substitute.
Why It Matters
A cuisine needs somebody willing to do the dull parts. Not the photogenic recipe, which everyone wants to write, but the entry on the seasoning, the essay on the oil, the honest history that ends in an open question, the piece that exists so that the next writer has something to cite. Amoako has been building that layer for Ghanaian and West African food, and the fact that she gives it away on a website means it lands where it is most needed, in the kitchens of first and second generation Ghanaians who grew up eating these dishes without ever being told where they came from. It is the same work Melissa Thompson does for Jamaican food, treating a plate as a history lesson that somebody has to teach.
Her first cookbook, Eat with Afia: A Celebration of Plant-Based Ghanaian Cooking, came out in August 2026. The plant-based framing there is worth reading carefully, because it is an argument rather than a diet. Most of the recipes, she points out, needed no modification at all, which tells you something about how Ghanaian cooking was built long before anyone in the West thought to make a lifestyle of it. That is Amoako's whole habit in one move. Look at the tradition closely enough, name what is actually there, and you usually find the answer was never the one being sold.
Explore Eat with Afia: https://eatwithafia.com
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