Sautéing • chile pepper • garlic • lemon juice • oil • parsley • salt • Sub-Saharan Africa
Pili-Pili Sauce
An easy-to-make hot sauce. Pronounced “pee-lee pee-lee”, also spelled pilipili. From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, this word is used throughout tropical Africa to refer to hot red peppers, sauces made from them, and foods cooked with these peppers or sauces. Is Pili-Pili a reduplication? See the Coupé-Coupé recipe.
Pili-Pili Sauce Recipe
An easy-to-make hot sauce.
Ingredients
5 chile peppers (i.e., hot red peppers!), cleaned and finely chopped
2 tbsp lemon juice (juice of one lemon)
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 sprigs of parsley, minced (optional)
3 tbsp cooking oil
pinch of salt
Instructions
1
Mix all ingredients by hand or with a blender or food processor. Cook in a hot skillet for a few minutes. Store in a clean glass jar in the refrigerator.
Serve with everything.
Ingredients
5 chile peppers (i.e., hot red peppers!), cleaned and finely chopped
2 tbsp lemon juice (juice of one lemon)
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 sprigs of parsley, minced (optional)
3 tbsp cooking oil
pinch of salt
Directions
1
Mix all ingredients by hand or with a blender or food processor. Cook in a hot skillet for a few minutes. Store in a clean glass jar in the refrigerator.
Serve with everything.
Instant pili-pili: Mix cayenne pepper or red pepper powder, garlic powder, and onion powder with a few spoonfuls of tomato sauce.
Children who couldn't eat pillipili were objects of scorn
Philippe Wamba
Philippe Wamba Philippe Wamba, the child of an African-American mother and a Conglese father wrote Kinship: A Family’s Journey in Africa and America (New York: Penguin Putnam/Dutton, 1999) in which he describes pilipili (among other things).
… when my father cooked, which was admittedly not often, Congolese food reigned; he specialized in huge pots of beans and salt fish, which we ate with mounds of sticky rice or foufou, a starchy, doughy Congolese staple my brothers and I learned to love. My father’s meals always made liberal use of pillipili, and he would encourage us to try as much as we could stand, saying that in Congo children who couldn’t eat pillipili were objects of scorn.