After years of obsessively scouring restaurants, markets, and the internet at large, I imagine myself pretty well apprised of the general ins and outs of most global cuisines, at least well enough to possess a passing familiarity with some of their products. Every so often, however, I’m totally thrown for a loop, a reminder of how much there still is (and always will be) left to learn. Even in a city where seemingly all the finest fruits of world cuisine are readily available with a little searching, much of Africa, particularly the inner quadrants, remains a huge mystery to the culturally voracious shopper. Enter Adja Khady (I did), an importing and distributing operation catering to a fundamentally Senegalese clientele, but which also offers products from Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, and many others. The resulting melange of West African languages printed on colorful bags and boxes made for a bit of initial confusion, but after a little snooping around (and some exhaustive follow-up research) I was able to suss out the proper uses for these ingredients, and even employ some of them myself. Also notable was the appearance of many French items, with a specifically Lebanese and Vietnamese bent, thanks to shared history of foreign administration and resultant cross-immigration of workers and soldiers between these places.
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When I started writing this post, there were (to my knowledge) no Somali restaurants in New York City. There now appears to be one, in some stage of soft-opening up in Harlem. This doesn’t alleviate the fact that the entire East African coast, from Sudan all the way down to Swaziland (and excepting the obvious Ethiopian) is barely represented in the NY metropolitan area, while West African eateries dot the Bronx, Upper Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. Some useful maps here note language disbursement across the five boroughs, confirming the presence of Ethiopian Amharic speakers in the Rockaways, but little representation elsewhere. Without this access point, the best way to peek into these mysterious cuisines is a little Googling. After preparing a Somali bizbaz sauce to liven up some leftover roasted potatoes, I became curious about the specifics of more substantial meals. Perched on the easternmost edge of the continent, Somalia has absorbed influences not only from colonialist occupiers (fascist spaghetti) but from nearby Arabian-peninsula nations, as well as India. One of these, the flatbread known as lahooh (or lahoh or laxoox), has roots in nearby Yemen, which in my experience appears to be one of the world’s preeminent bread-producing nations. Producing a healthy stack of these pancakey discs from this recipe, a few mistakes were made, including an evident lack of bubbles, but the relative idea survived. These were consumed in three different forms, one involving a further transformation of this recipe, with the lahooh stacked to create a sort of frittata, with further substitutions of pimenton (good in everything) and fresh garlic scapes for the scallions. The other was an American-style riff on the traditional breakfast lahooh, served with of ghee and honey, with the addition of sweet eggs, flavored with cardamom, topped with the proprietary complement of maple syrup and bananas. The filling tasted like the top of French toast. I consumed the last of the lahooh in the most traditional manner, by itself with a generous layer of honey and butter, which was probably the best use of all.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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