Garri and Eba

West Africa's keeping food, grated cassava soured under weight for days and then toasted dry in a shallow pan, drunk cold with water and groundnuts or stirred hot into the stiff dough called eba

Origin: Lagos and Yorubaland, Nigeria

From the journey of Cassava.

Nigeria grows more cassava than any country on earth, by a very wide margin, and almost none of it is exported. It is food rather than commodity, and the form most of it takes is garri: grated cassava packed into sacks, weighted, and left to ferment for three to five days, then sieved and toasted in a wide shallow pan over a fire, stirred without pause until it is dry, gritty, and pale gold. The souring and the toasting between them complete the detoxification that the grating begins, and they leave a meal that keeps for months in a sack in a hot and humid climate without refrigeration. That is the whole point of it, and it is why garri became the food of resilience in West Africa. It expanded enormously during and after the Biafran war, when roots that could be left in the ground and dug at need were the difference between eating and not, and it has expanded again with every currency crisis since. It is eaten in two completely different ways. Garri soakings is the cold version and the cheapest meal in West Africa: garri in a bowl with cold water, sugar, roasted groundnuts, and sometimes milk or ice, eaten with a spoon as the grains swell. Eba is the hot version: garri stirred into boiling water into a stiff, smooth, faintly elastic dough, torn off in pieces and used to scoop up egusi, okra soup, or pepper soup. The technology arrived twice. The plant came with the Portuguese, but the close resemblance between garri and Brazilian farinha is not a coincidence. The Afro-Brazilian returnee communities who settled along the Bight of Benin from the 1830s, the Agudás or Amaros, brought back processing techniques their families had used in Bahia, and the nineteenth-century spread of garri through Yorubaland followed them.

Ingredients

Eba

400 g garri (yellow or white), for eba
700 ml water, for eba

Garri soakings

150 g garri, for soakings
400 ml very cold water
2 tbsp granulated sugar, to taste
60 g roasted groundnuts
4 tbsp evaporated milk, optional

Method

For eba, bring the water to a rolling boil in a heavy pan and take it off the heat.
Pour the garri into the hot water in a steady stream across the surface, letting it mound up above the waterline, and leave it undisturbed for one minute to swell.
Now work it hard with a stout wooden spoon, folding and pressing the dough against the side of the pan, for three to four minutes until it is completely smooth, stiff, and comes away cleanly.
Turn the eba out onto a plate, or shape it in a wetted bowl and invert it into a smooth dome. Serve hot with egusi, okra soup, or pepper soup.
For garri soakings, put the garri in a bowl and pour over the very cold water. Leave for two minutes as the grains swell and float.
Stir in the sugar and the groundnuts, add the evaporated milk if you are using it, and eat immediately with a spoon.

Notes

Garri is sold in every African grocer and online, coarse or fine, white or yellow. It is a finished product and does not need cooking beyond what is described here. Garri is not the same as cassava flour (lafun, fufu flour, kokonte). Those are dried, milled root and are cooked into a dough from cold. Garri is already fermented and toasted. It is also emphatically not the Japanese gari, the sheets of sweet pickled ginger served with sushi. The two words are unrelated homophones. The sourness varies a great deal between brands and regions. Ijebu garri is prized for being noticeably sour and is the connoisseur's choice for soakings.

The Gastrographer

Name: Garri and Eba
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 20 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Nigeria
Ingredients: 400 g garri (yellow or white), for eba; 700 ml water, for eba; 150 g garri, for soakings; 400 ml very cold water; 2 tbsp granulated sugar, to taste; 60 g roasted groundnuts; 4 tbsp evaporated milk, optional

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control