Browse recipes

A silky, gently spiced stew where peanut butter melts into tomato and stock to make something deeply savory. Sweet potato and chickpeas make it a full meal in one pot.

Egypt's national dish: rice, lentils and pasta layered together under a sharp spiced tomato sauce and a heap of crisp fried onions. Carbohydrate on carbohydrate, and completely justified.

Collards braised slowly with onion, garlic, ginger and turmeric until they turn silky and sweet. Mild, garlicky and green. The calm dish on an Ethiopian plate.

Gunpowder green tea brewed strong over a fistful of spearmint, sweetened hot and poured over ice. Bracing, fragrant and very sweet, as it should be.

Chickpea flour whisked into a spiced onion base until it becomes a thick, smoky, deeply savory stew. One of the fastest genuinely great things you can cook from a cupboard.

Peppers and onions softened down with harissa and white beans until jammy. One pan, big flavor, and almost entirely from cupboard and freezer.

A spicy vegetable relish of onion, pepper, carrot and beans in a curried tomato base. Served hot or cold alongside almost anything, and better the next day.

A dark, spongy apricot-jam pudding that has hot cream sauce poured over it the moment it leaves the oven and drinks the lot.

The Ethiopian red lentil stew. Almost nothing in it, and yet the berbere and a genuinely long onion cook do all the heavy lifting.

A fragrant tomato, lentil and chickpea soup thick with herbs and finished with lemon. Traditionally eaten to break the fast during Ramadan, and restorative at any time.

Plaited dough fried gold and plunged straight into ice-cold syrup, so the outside stays crisp while the inside floods sweet.

Chickpeas and sweet potato in a warmly spiced tomato sauce, with dried apricots melting into it for a sweetness that plays against the cumin and cinnamon.

Gnamakoudji: raw ginger blended, steeped and strained, then sharpened with lime and sweetened. Sold ice-cold on every roadside from Bamako to Abidjan.

The Egyptian breakfast: fava beans warmed through and crushed roughly in their own liquid, sharpened with lemon and garlic, then flooded with olive oil and scattered with tomato and parsley. Eaten with bread, out of the same bowl.