ON THE TABLE
BY JOAN BAXTER PHOTOS BY STEVE SMITH, VISIONFIRE STUDIOS
Out of I
t began a decade ago with a call from a friend in West Africa asking me to get in touch with a young Malian woman, Oumou Nomoko, who had recently moved to Edmonton. It ended with her preparing a feast (or several) of thanksgiving for African food in my kitchen in northern Nova Scotia. We had much to be thankful for, not least that we had finally met each other and that we had both just written books celebrating African cuisines. Hers, Les Gourmandises de Dilly: La Cuisine Africaine, a collection of traditional recipes from the West African countries
The North Shore
of Mali and Burkina Faso, and mine, Seven Grains of Paradise: A Culinary Journey in Africa, which highlights some of the marvellous foods, farms, crops and food cultures on the continent. Thing is, until this year, I had never actually had the pleasure of meeting Oumou. Ours had been a tenuous and improbable connection. The friend who had initially put us in touch, a colleague from my time as a BBC correspondent in Mali, was a friend of her parents in the Malian capital, Bamako, and he had been concerned that Oumou needed a
ah! Fall 2017 - 38
