February 28, 2025

Alexander Smalls and Nina Oduro, "The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa" (Phaidon Press, 2024)

23 minutes

The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa (Phaidon Press, 2024) is an elegant collection of 120 home cooking recipes from Africa’s most exciting culinary voices today. Extensively researched and thoughtfully curated by James Beard Award winning chef, author, and restaurateur Alexander Smalls in collaboration with Dine Diaspora CEO Nina Oduro, this bold volume celebrates Africa’s extraordinary gastronomic past and present across a breadth of dishes. Composed of 55 countries with more than 1.4 billion people, and 2,000-plus languages spoken, Africa is home to distinct and diverse culinary traditions.

The Contemporary African Kitchen centers Africa’s multifaceted cuisine and, as Smalls writes in the introduction, seeks to bring it into the “contemporary, modern, and stunning realm, illustrated through a myriad of stories, images, and recipes, all of which highlight Africa’s gifts to the world, through people and cuisine.” To accomplish this, Smalls and Oduro meticulously selected 33 of Africa’s most innovative and influential figures working today, all of whom were born or raised across the continent or have demonstrated contributions across countries, among them: Sinoyolo Sifo, Matse Uwatse, Eric Adjepong, Rōze Traore, Mogau Seshoene, and Dieuveil Malonga.

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