Abla Pokou II at the table

Among the Baoulé and all Akan peoples, a meal is not conceived as starter-main-dessert but around a staple of pounded starch — yam foutou — which you tear off by hand and dip into a shared sauce placed at the center of the mat. Everything revolves around the yam, a sacred root: the sauce (game, smoked fish, leafy greens) accompanies, palm wine honors, and sweet porridges seal covenants. Everyone eats together from the same dish, using only the right hand, as a sign of community restored after the great crossing.

Yam is the king of Akan foods, celebrated each year at the New Yam Festival; no one tastes it before the ritual. Red palm oil, extracted from the oil palm of the dense forest, colors and flavors nearly every sauce and connects each recipe to the land that Pokou led her people across.