Aura Pokou at the table

Among the Akan people, from whom the Baoulé originate, meals are not arranged into starter-main-dessert. They revolve around a pairing: a filling paste (pounded yam, mashed plantain) shaped by hand, and a single, generous mother sauce shared from a large communal bowl. You dip the paste ball into it with your fingertips. Around this core gravitate the offering foods placed for the ancestors, the game of royal feasts, the smoked fish of the journey, and the palm wine poured for both the living and the dead.

Red palm oil, extracted from the fruit of the oil palm, tints all Akan sauces with saffron and gives them that round, almost fruity taste that is impossible to mistake. It is spiced up with grains of paradise (*Aframomum melegueta*), the pungent, lemony African pepper that perfumed West African kitchens long before chili peppers from the Americas arrived. These two signatures alone say: this is a table of the Akan forest.