A Liberian Tour With Fork (and Fingers)

[elleng]

(Something fun, for today)

I KNEW my plan to spend my recent trip home eating my way around Monrovia was off to a good start when my sister showed up at the airport to greet me accompanied by a pot of bitterleaf over doughy fufu.

My mom and I, jet-lagged and woozy, peered into the trunk of Eunice’s car. I snatched the cover off the pot. The scent — a pungent mix of palm oil, smoked fish, juicy crawfish, roasted beef and the leafy spinach-like bitterleaf greens — hit my system as swiftly as a strong shot of espresso. Into the stew went a greedy finger; I was licking the sauce before Eunice could smack my hand away.

Liberian food is my weakness. Hearty, spicy and influenced by the immigrants and settlers who have over the years made this tiny coastal country home, it incorporates the best of West African cooking with traditions from the American South, where enslaved Africans brought their recipes, refined them and then took them back to Africa when Liberia was colonized by freed American blacks in the early 19th century.

The result is Creole cooking with a coastal African twist — “sweet” — as we say in Liberia, the way an Italian would use “squisito.” Big, hearty stews that incorporate all manner of meats, fish, chicken, pork and shellfish, served over either rice or fufu, a fermented cassava dumpling that drinks in the flavors of the stew.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/travel/20PersonalJourney.html?hpw