Our current exhibition at Boys’ Quarters is titled Erasure by artist Johnson Uwadinma. One of my favourite pieces in the show is a Boys’ Quarters commission that was made especially for the show by Johnson, titled “Amnesia”.

Amnesia is a piece made from newspaper, colored thread and wire. See it pictured above with its creator, artist Johnson Uwadinma. The work is an extension of Johnson’s obsession with memory and is inspired by a childhood memory of walking to school and buying akara to eat on the road. This "akara" (deep-fried black-eyed-bean fritters) would be placed in an old newspaper by the vendor. The screwed up newspaper in Johnson's work reflects the shape of the akara but it also talks about how the stories in the newspapers were treated: stained with oil, screwed up, discarded.

To my mind, like newspapers, there are many stories embedded in food. But it becomes a part of you in a way that is much more profound. Food becomes your flesh, becomes your cellular memory. Activated by smell. And so, inspired by Johnson’s beautiful piece and my recent return to my beloved Bahia, Brazil I decided to serve a re-imagined version of akara (or the Bahian version acaraje) at his opening which took place on December 13th. I made: Akara Stuffed with Pounded Avocado and Sorgor Salad. It was a thing of beauty. See below:

Acarajé is the Afro-Brazilian version of akara and it was brought to Brazil by enslaved Yoruba peoples. In Bahia it is served as a savory snack and they put salad, caruru, vatapa and shrimp in it. The first time I encountered it I was 19 years old many (many) moons ago. I had travelled alone to Bahia in the North East of Brazil and was shocked to encounter akara in its savory form. It took some getting used to - especially as I never really liked our Nigerian akara in the first place. Akara has very little room for error, it has to be cooked perfectly. But when deep fried bean fritter is done well there is no other kind of food you want to eat. I recently went back to Bahia in November 2014 and enjoyed acarajé for the first time in nearly 20 years. The crispiness of the Bahian acarajé is something that I love and wanted to replicate. The Nigerian akara has a surface and texture of a yeastless doughtnut. See the crispier Brazilian version below left and the less crispy Nigerian one on the right:

For this show - and inspired by my recent trip to Bahia as well as Johnson’s exhibition - I decided to do an akara/acarajé I could get behind. I wanted to do a version that re-imagined it and featured local Niger Delta ingredients that inspired me. I was very pleased with the result. So this is the recipe. You have to prepare the avocado paste, salad and the bean paste. First up: 

Pounded Avocado:

Go and call it guacamole if you want but I consider it a Neo-Nigerian thing because we eat Avocados a whole bunch and I, a Nigerian, created this dish ;-) First we pounded garlic and onion and scotch bonnet pepper in the large wooden mortar mortar, then we added just-ripe avocados, salt, cumin and lime. Simples. We transported the avocado to the gallery along with our grill and a whole load of other utensils. Once at the gallery we assembled the salad:

Sorgor salad is made from sorgor leaves. These leaves came direct from my Auntie Saba's garden in the village in Ogoniland. We picked the young tender leaves. Sorgor is the Ogoni name for these leaves but I believe they are also known as Okazi leaves in the Igbo language. (There are so many languages and therefore so many names for Nigeria's native ingredients, I often have to find the Igbo or Yoruba name online, then search for the Latin name, then I show a picture to folk on my iPad to find out what we call it in my own Ogoni language). Anyway these leaves are eaten cooked in many parts of West and Central Africa but we Ogonis eat it raw as well.

We don’t eat a lot of raw greens in Nigeria apart from cucumber, carrot, avocado and garden egg. So I was delighted to discover this salad which we never ate as children when we visited Port Harcourt. Traditionally it has other ingredients I chose not to include such as fish and “kanda” which is boiled cow skin. The leaves are washed and thinly sliced and dressed in an incredible dressing which sounds unappetising but somehow gets into your system in a way that you cannot forget. That is: pounded crayfish and peppers mixed with palm oil, raw onion and potash. Yes that’s potassium. This potash or potassium helps soften the leaves and believe me you don’t want to do without it. I tried once to soften the sorgor leaves with lime (like so much kale) but this did not work so I gave in to tried-and-tested tradition and potash it was. Now I would not have it any other way. The potash is mixed with a little bit of water and it looks a bit like pond water (below right) but don't be put off. You pour that into the crayfish, pepper and oil mixture.

The mixture emulsifies slightly and is completely delicious. See below. You can add salt at this point. My mouth is watering right now and yours would too if you knew what this tasted like.

Then you add raw onion, followed by the chopped up greens and mix well.

And there you have sorgor salad. The salad is normally served at special occasions and always (always) with palm wine. It is the pork scratchings or bag of chips to a pint of beer and people eat it gleefully and neatly with their hands. But not today. In this case it is going into a deep fried bean fritter.

We decided to cook the akara or deep-fried fritter at the gallery. Mostly because it is so much nicer to have just-fried akara but also I just love the smell of kerosene and fire. It reminds me of being in the village and there is something elemental about the heat waves that rise, the smell of the burning charcoal and the earnest activity that gives a benediction to the art work we are doing at Boys' Quarters. We create. We cook. We feed people. We are in the business of creating memories and embedding stories and food is a part of our work.

We fired up the grill and began to fry up the akara mix (above left). The akara mix takes quite a lot of time to make and we prepared it in advance. First you soak the black-eyed beans then you spend several hours taking the skins off the beans before seasoning said beans with dried crayfish, salt, tomato puree and pulsing it through a food processor till it is fairly smooth. We added some baking soda because I wanted a lighter texture. That mixture is put into hot oil. In Brazil they fry it in palm oil but I went with the modern Nigerian version and used peanut oil because we already have palm oil in the salad.

Although they still didn't have the rough, crispy exterior of the Brazilian acaraje (next time I go to Brazil I will find out exactly how they do it) the akara were beautiful. Slightly crunchy on the outside. I then split the delicious fried bean cakes and filled it with avocado paste and salad.

It was magnificent. Hot pillowy akara with a cool, spicy and slightly sharp avocado with this fresh yet creamy crustaceany salad that somehow defies description and needs to be eaten to be understood. Very filling too.

Every skeptical Nigerian that had doubted my invention kept coming back for more I am pleased to report.

As an aside, I must thank my house assistant Lewa who always brings it in the fashion dept when she comes to work an opening. She is elegance personified and a wonderful cook.

We did a banging dessert (rum and banana cassava cake served with groundnut ice-cream) which I will write up later... 

To find out more about the show visit: www.boysquartersprojectspace.com/exhibitions/erasure/