New African cuisine at Harvard
Think about a dish that makes you feel at home — warm cinnamon rolls, potato pancakes, soup dumplings, pupusas, pierogis, creamy piles of corn pudding. Now, Selassie Atadika told the audience in the latest installment of the “Science and Cooking” lecture series, “Imagine if this dish no longer existed.” And with that Atadika, food expert and owner of the Midunu food company in Accra, Ghana, segued into a talk about her efforts to keep Africa’s culinary heritage intact by encouraging the use of traditional cooking methods and ingredients. Her goal is to keep dishes such as moi moi pudding, hearty okra soup, and spicy jollof rice in the mainstream in a way that nudges Ghanaians toward using locally sourced ingredients and thinking about viewing them as haute cuisine. Atadika calls her approach new African cuisine because of the modern spin it puts on meals that are well-known across the continent, but are often being...