Describes the food and beverages of Africa in relation to its history, geography, and culture. Also includes recipes and information about regional specialties and festive foods.

Africa’s art of cooking is a key part of its history. All too often Africa is associated with famine, but in Stirring the Pot, James C. McCann describes how the ingredients, the practices, and the varied tastes of African cuisine comprise a body of historically gendered knowledge practiced and perfected in households across diverse human and ecological landscape. McCann reveals how tastes and culinary practices are integral to the understanding of history and more generally to the new literature on food as social history. Stirring the Pot offers a chronology of African cuisine beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing from Africa’s original edible endowments to its globalization. McCann traces cooks’ use of new crops, spices, and tastes, including New World imports like maize, hot peppers, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes, and peanuts, as well as plantain, sugarcane, spices, Asian rice, and other ingredients from the Indian Ocean world. He analyzes recipes, not as fixed ahistorical documents,but as lively and living records of historical change in women’s knowledge and farmers’ experiments. A final chapter describes in sensuous detail the direct connections of African cooking to New Orleans jambalaya, Cuban rice and beans, and the cooking of African Americans’ “soul food.” Stirring the Pot breaks new ground and makes clear the relationship between food and the culture, history, and national identity of Africans.

Describes the food and beverages of Africa in relation to its history, geography, and culture. Also includes recipes and information about regional specialties and festive foods.

More than 500 recipes from the subtle, spicy, varied cuisines of the Middle East, ranging from inexpensive but tasty peasant fare to elaborate banquet dishes.

This book comprises of various traditional recipes for various ethnic groups of southern Africa. The recipes have been selected to give an overview of the food culture in the southern part of the African continent, but it remains for people who have grown up in a specific tradition and can draw from the recollections of their grandparents, to record the complete food culture of the various peoples.