Flavours for life, not just October: what to cook in Black History Month, and beyond

Earlier this month, I hosted a panel for African Caribbean food month. The venue was not outwardly promising – a largely unoccupied, high-rise office building in south London that had the air of the place where a Waystar Royco employee might receive terrible news. But the drifting scent of scotch bonnet and fried plantain, steel pan music, grinning locals tucking into everything from Eritrean injera to Ghanaian rice and beans reminded me of the transformative power of culture and cuisine.

The discussion itself featured chefs Louise Simms (the MasterChef UK quarter-finalist and supper club founder), Nathan Collymore (of the acclaimed plant-based restaurant Jam Delish), Jason Howard (a Great British Menu alum of Barbadian heritage) and Opeoluwa Odutayo (a Nigerian-born recipe developer), and was just as nourishing. It was a spirited, sometimes mischievous conversation about the growing prominence of Black British cuisine, its enlivening diversity and the ways that dishes originally from parts of Africa and the Caribbean contain fascinating overlaps and echoes. It got me thinking about how these broad food cultures, so often seen as separate when I was growing up, are now frequently presented jointly, in a manner that celebrates difference and cross-cultural solidarity. Jerk chicken and jollof rice nuzzle beside each other on celebration spreads and restaurant menus up and down the country; chefs such as Akwasi Brenya-Mensa and Lerato Umah-Shaylor promote a nimble, broad-span take on Afro-fusion cooking. The result: this interconnected larder is as varied, vital and enticing as it’s ever been. Black History Month, which enters its home stretch this week, is the perfect opportunity to explore the immense flavour potential of its dynamic, richly seasoned contours.

Even setting aside my Nigerian bias, west Africa feels a good place to start. Aji Akokomi – the restaurateur behind London restaurants Akara and Michelin-starred Akoko – has helped to establish west African cuisine as a borderless, regional dining category and nudge it to even greater prominence. His achievable, layered jollof rice and Senegalese-inspired leg of dibi barbecued lamb (pictured top) encapsulate this nation-straddling approach. The same goes for Adejoké Bakare (whose restaurant Chishuru recently acquired a Michelin star) and her vibrant mix of a slow-steamed, Ivorian stew called chicken kedjenou and millet dambu that is associated with Niger.

Of course, the painful realities of enslavement and forced migration underpin the fact that west African recipes and techniques also reverberate across the Caribbean. Salt fish fritters, also known as accra across the islands, are a descendant of akara, the beloved Nigerian spiced bean fritter, and few recipes have the crisp, zinging clarity of Trinidad-born chef Brian Danclair’s salt cod version. Elsewhere, Melissa Thompson’s peanut and sweet potato stew unites Jamaican and west African principles into a warming, fragrant whole.

One of the things that takes Caribbean cooking beyond its African ancestry is the heavy influence of south Asian cuisine (not to mention Chinese and South American). Marie Mitchell’s aubergine curry with buttery, paratha-coded roti exemplifies Indo-Caribbean cooking, while Andi Oliver’s chocolate curry goat, in this collection of highly batchable recipes, throws in some Mexican mole DNA for good measure.

These Indian accents also catapult us back towards similarly influenced flourishes in the south, east and even north of Africa. The continent’s sheer size means that too much smooshing together of distinct, ethnically diverse cuisines is enormously problematic. However, to my mind, recipes such as Marcus Samuelsson’s Ethiopian-inspired berbere spare ribs, Fozia Ismail’s cinnamon-prickled Somali bean stew, and Rukmini Iyer’s riff on Uganda’s “rolex” chapati wraps bridge the gap between regional styles and feature an intangible, shared quality of Africanness. That said, if you want to end with something sweet, you could do a lot worse than hop back to either Nigeria with the Flygerians’ puff puff doughnuts, or the Caribbean with Felicity Cloake’s fruit-rich, rum-laced black cake. One taste of any of these dishes, and I feel confident that you will know the same thing that those of us who love African and Caribbean cooking already feel deeply in our bones: these flavours are for life, not just October.

• Picky, by Jimi Famurewa, is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £20. To order a copy for £18, go to the Guardian Bookshop.

Light reading | In other diaspora news, this was also the week that communities around the world celebrated Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas, the Hindu and Sikh festivals of light. An apposite time to bang the drum and toot a horn in praise of chef and Hoppers founder Karan Gokani’s latest cookbook, Indian 101. This authoritative and cleanly designed compendium (I especially appreciate the illustrations detailing the principles of how to properly build and deploy a tarka) makes Indian classics feel freshly exciting and achievable. Instant semolina dosas. Masala beans and egg on toast. Indian bread and butter pudding. My plan is to spend most of autumn working my way through it.

Sweet success | My food memoir, Picky, took me to Henley literary festival for the first time. The event was a total joy, and one of the highlights was the treats I got from Gower Cottage Brownies, who sponsored the event. They are squidgy, rich and not at all cloying or sickly; I’ve already ordered another dozen for the family. If they last longer than a few hours, I’ll call it a win.

The best thing I ate this week | I squeaked in for an extremely enjoyable lunch at the freshly unveiled Alta, a northern Spanish-influenced live-fire spot, launched near London’s Carnaby Street by the South African-born El Bulli alumnus Rob Roy Cameron. It is a gorgeous space, and the creative, precise dishes have smoke, smartly deployed ferments and an eye-widening abundance of flavour. The sardine empanada – golden pastry seemingly encasing a whole diving fish – is the rare viral dish that is as impressive on the palate as it is on the eye.

670 Grams, Birmingham | ​“The decor is kitsch crypt, and very dark in places, with not a single 50-watt bulb in the house,” writes Grace Dent. “It all feels a bit like being in an exclusive 1980s Soho hotel during a power cut.” And the food, led by Kray Treadwell (Michelin’s UK young chef of the year in 2021), is equally intense. “The menu, which is painstakingly executed over six or 12 courses, is a cascade of small, meaningful bowls – an earthy bone broth here, a sliver of Jemison Park trout there – all of which just ooze flavour and, like all the best superheroes, turn up with an origin story. Meat and two veg this is not.” Read the full review.