Central African Republic

Country - Central African Republic

Cuisine Description - The African cuisine, in general, is one that reflects indigenous traditions, but also many influences from Arabs, Europeans and Asians. Africa is the second largest landmass on the planet and it hosts hundreds of ethnic and social groups. Of course, the African cuisine reflects all this diversity especially in the use of basic ingredients and in the cooking techniques. Central Africa is situated between the Tibesti Mountains and the vast basin of the Congo River. The place has remained outside the area of culinary influences for a very long period of time. The first influences started to appear in the Central African cuisine only at the end of the 19th century, when the African people started to give more importance to what they ate and how the food looked. However, the Central African cuisine adopted some widespread ingredients from other cuisines due to the slave trade during the 16th century. Such adopted ingredients would be cassava, Peanut, chilli pepper plants and a few more other. Obviously, these imported ingredients have had a major influence on the Central African cuisine. Still, the African people preserved their traditional cooking methods, thus the new ingredients were sometimes used a lot differently than they were usually used. Today, Central African cuisine is considered to be quite a unique cuisine, presenting a large variety of exotic dishes.

The most used ingredients in the Central African cuisine are the plantains and cassava. The cuisine here is a wonderful combination of fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. The tradition there is to cook Fufu-like starchy dishes, which are usually prepared from fermented cassava roots. These strange but also delicious dishes are sometimes used to garnish grilled meat. Another very popular thing in the Central African cuisine is the sauce. The Africans like to eat almost everything garnished with sauces that is why they developed a lot of recipes of various, tasty sauces. The most traditional meats in Central Africa are the ones of the animals that can be hunted in the African forests. There are a lot of local ingredients that are used when cooking that is why, when they cook imported dishes they still preserve the local taste. For instance, the Central African spinach stew is cooked with tomato, peppers, chilli peppers, onions and Peanut butter. cassava plants are probably considered to be the national cooking ingredient and they are consumed as cooked greens. The Central African cuisine wasn’t popular in the West, but lately it started to be more and more popular as immigrants bring their own recipes with them. Copyright Recipes Wiki