Each Nigerian home has a store of pantry items that is a mix of local, regional, and global ingredients. These pantry staples are the key to Nigerian cuisine—from preserves, ferments, dried herbs, spices, and legumes to fresh fruits and vegetables.
In Nigeria, we don't have pantries. What one calls a pantry in Europe and North America, we call a "store," and no two are the same. Each home store is a melange of local, regional, and global ingredients. Some ingredients—palm oil, crayfish, fermented seasonings—speak volumes about all the ways Nigerians are similar despite our many different languages and cultures.
Bananas, pineapple, sugar cane, pawpaw, and mangoes are some of the most commonly eaten fruits. They are eaten out of hand and are rarely cooked. Fruits like tomatoes and plantains are, on the other hand, quite frequently cooked and essentially treated as vegetables.Tomatoes, onions, and peppers—sweet and hot—are some of the most ubiquitous ingredients in our stores.
There are so many varieties of beans in Nigeria, with black-eyed beans and other cowpeas being the most common. You’ll find them simply cooked, stewed in red sauces, puréed into soups, and turned into pottage with corn, yams, plantains, and/or sweet potatoes. The off-white, creamy, brown version is rehydrated and used in obe ishapa, a soup popular in the southwest that also features egusi seeds. The dark red version forms the base of a drink, often combined with dried ginger slices and whole cloves. To sweeten it naturally, some people cook it with pineapple juice and/or the fruit's flesh and skin, others add tamarind and sweeten it with sugar or honey. It's served both hot and cold.Nuts and seeds serve many purposes in Nigerian cuisine.
Ground dry pepper is one of the most popular ingredients. Fine and coarse blends are ground from slim, dried red chiles with single or multiple varieties of hot red peppers, including cayenne, bird’s eye, as well as others. Think of it as our equivalent to black pepper: It brings heat to everything, and is used all the time, added to taste when seasoning eggs or broth. Even when fresh chiles are used in a dish, you’ll find us sprinkling a pinch of dry pepper over it.
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