the zambian food series: how zambia tastes itself
there is no more fundamental expression of zambian identity than the act of making nshima, sitting down to eat it, rolling it in your right hand into a soft ball, dipping it into the relish, and eating it with the people you love. this is not food. this is not merely nutrition. this is the daily ceremony that has marked zambian family life across every tribe, every province, every generation for as long as the maize and the cassava and the millet that make it have grown in this soil.
the zambian food series begins with nshima because nshima is the foundation. but it will not stay at nshima. it will go to the relish โ the extraordinary diversity of what zambian cooks put alongside the nshima, the proteins and the vegetables and the sauces that vary by province and by season and by cultural tradition in ways that the rest of the world has never fully understood because the rest of the world has not been looking.
ifisashi โ the peanut and vegetable relish of northern province, made from groundnut powder, dried vegetables, and a patience in cooking that the recipe requires and that the result rewards.
chibwabwa โ pumpkin leaves cooked with groundnut powder in a way that turns a garden vegetable into something deeply satisfying, the kind of dish that every zambian who has been abroad too long dreams about on a cold night in a foreign city.
chikanda โ the extraordinary preparation made from the ground tubers of a wild orchid that grows in the miombo woodland of northern province, mixed with peanut powder and a process of cooking and pressing that produces a firm, protein-rich cake. called african polony for its appearance. tasting of nothing the name suggests.
kapenta โ the tiny, dried, intensely flavoured fish from lake kariba and lake tanganyika that appears in every market and most kitchens across the country, the umami foundation of countless zambian relishes.
the zambian food series will explore all of this โ not as a cookbook, but as a cultural document. food in zambia is not separate from the history and the kingdoms and the rivers and the land that the other series have been describing. the chikanda that comes from the miombo woodland orchids of northern province carries the bemba people's specific relationship to their forest. the kapenta from lake tanganyika arrived in southern province along the same trade routes the kingdoms series described. the sweet potato of chibale chiefdom that feeds lusaka is a food story and a cultural story and a land story simultaneously.
food is how zambia tastes itself.
the zambian food series begins. ๐ฒ
