Frying • oil • plantain (plantain banana) • salt • Sub-Saharan Africa
Plantains (Plantain Bananas)
Plantains, “potatoes of the air” or “cooking bananas” are the fruit of the Musa Paradisiaca, a type of banana plant. Plantains are more starchy than sweet and must be cooked before being eaten. They are a staple crop in much of Africa, and are served boiled, steamed, baked, or fried. Plantains grilled over a charcoal fire are popular street food in many African cities. In the Congo river region, plantain bananas—peeled, sliced, and boiled, or cut into rondelles and fried in oil—are called makemba (singular: likemba).
Plantains Recipe
Ingredients
oil for pan-frying
4 plantains, 1 per serving (plantains can be cooked while they are unripened and green)
salt or African Hot Sauce (to taste)
Instructions
1
Peel and cut plantains, either into thin slices, or slice each plantain in half and cut each half lengthwise. Heat the oil in a pan or skillet on the stove top. Add plantains (in a single layer) and fry until golden.
2
Serve with African Hot Sauce or salt as a snack, an appetizer, or a side dish. Can also be served sprinkled with sugar as a snack or dessert.
Ingredients
oil for pan-frying
4 plantains, 1 per serving (plantains can be cooked while they are unripened and green)
salt or African Hot Sauce (to taste)
Directions
1
Peel and cut plantains, either into thin slices, or slice each plantain in half and cut each half lengthwise. Heat the oil in a pan or skillet on the stove top. Add plantains (in a single layer) and fry until golden.
2
Serve with African Hot Sauce or salt as a snack, an appetizer, or a side dish. Can also be served sprinkled with sugar as a snack or dessert.
Boiled Plantains
Boiled plantains are more common than fried plantains (and they are better for you, and less expensive to prepare). Serve boiled plantains as a side dish for any African meal.
To boil plantains: peel and cut each plantain into two or three pieces, boil until tender.
Not out of Africa: Plantains (and many varieties of sweet bananas) are common throughout tropical Africa. However banana plants are not native to Africa. Bananas originated and were first cultivated in the islands of Southeast Asia (today’s Malaysia and Indonesia). They arrived in Africa during the first millennium AD, brought by Malay-Polynesian peoples who settled in Madagascar, or perhaps by Arabs or Indians who traded and settled on Africa’s East Coast. Banana cultivation is especially common in Africa’s great lakes region, notably Uganda. From there the practice of banana cultivation was spread by Bantu people to the rest of tropical Africa; indeed it was plantain and banana cultivation, along with the knowledge of ironworking (to make better tools and weapons), that allowed the Bantu people to dominate Central and Southern Africa.
Banana Chips
Living off the Country, published in Nigeria in 1942, was a cookbook for Europeans in Africa that featured local recipes and foodstuffs. These instructions are reproduced in Tales from the Dark Continent (Charles Allen, editor, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979) which collects various documents related to British colonialism in Africa.
Banana Chips (A substitute for potato chips with fried fish) Peel green bananas and slice lengthways or crossways as desired. Sprinkle with pepper and salt and fry up quickly in fat or lard. Pile on a dish and serve immediately.
A Power of Increasing the Fruitfulness of the Plantain-Trees
James George Frazer
James George Frazer was a professor of social anthropology at Liverpool who spent a good part of his life writing and adding to his major work, The Golden Bough (Abridged edition; New York: The Macmillan Co., 1922; first published 1890; various editions since then). He included this example from Uganda’s Ganda (also called Baganda or Waganda) people in his chapter on “The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation”. (The subsequent portion of the text is not suitable for inclusion in a website used by school children.)
The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of the ground that among them a barren wife is generally sent away, because she is supposed to prevent her husband’s garden from bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the twins a ceremony is performed, the object of which clearly is to transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains.
(Chapter XI — The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation)
Boiled Ripe Plantains
Robert Hamill Nassau
American missionary Robert Hamill Nassau wrote that boiled plantains were his favorite, in My Ogowe: Being a Narrative of Daily Incidents During Sixteen Years in Equatorial West Africa(The Neale Publishing Company, New York, 1914)
Even after the long interval to the present time, and tasting every variety of vegetable, I know none that I enjoy more than boiled ripe plantains. (Chapter III — Prospecting — 1874)
In Central and Western Africa, plantains are cooked and mashed to make Fufu and similar Fufu-like staples (see Fufu, et cetera).
In Ghana, plantains are mixed with spices and fried in hot oil to make Kelewele.
In Eastern Africa, plantains are fermented to make a kind of beer or wine (see Pombe, Tembo, and Máwá).
In Uganda, plantain bananas are wrapped in plantain leaves and steam-cooked until tender. (Banana-leaf cookery is described on the Liboké de Viande and Liboké de Poisson recipe pages.)
More about Plantains in the Rare Recipes pages: