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Photo credits: the author, Ala Kheir and Duha Mohamed.
The Making of the Book
Growing up in the UK, my connection to Sudanese food was strictly through my mother’s daily cooking, and periodic family gatherings on weekends. I’d never come across any documentation or representation of Sudanese cuisine in any media outlet. Years later I found myself in a process of documenting Sudanese recipes to reconnect with our culture while living away from home. I wanted to continue the practice of making traditional food as part of my daily life as a budding foodie.
A Sudanese food tray loaded with some famous local dishes
My interest in Sudanese food became more focused and of greater importance when I discovered the lack of commonly accessible information online on Sudanese recipes and their food cultures. This lack of information in the public domain spurred me to create my social media accounts and website, which focus on documenting Sudanese food and culture.
Today’s plethora of content on Sudanese food commonly found on Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram are in stark contrast to the days when I was one of very few creators producing such relatively unseen media. As such, my early social media content brought about a lot of attention in a short period, and it was then that I started hearing from other Sudanese in diaspora, as well as mixed heritage Sudanese, from all over the world, that I realised the importance of documenting these recipes for our generation and future generations of Sudanese.
Mashed okra (Bamya) served with kisra, alongside the wooden whisk al-Mofrakah that did all the hard work
This project began as a personal mission to gather my family's recipes as a means to feel more connected with my waning Sudanese identity. Having been raised in the UK from a young age, I felt distant from my Sudanese identity. My connections to Sudan were limited to short annual trips usually over the Christmas holiday period to visit family and attend weddings, during which I was often treated like an outsider by the locals.
While in the UK, gatherings with our UK-based Sudanese community were limited to weekend trips, often far away from home. I began to think that I wanted to be able to make typical Sudanese foods on my own, without needing to rely on my mother’s cooking or her guidance. This began while I was living away from our home in Birmingham and studying at university in Manchester. At the time, I’d grown accustomed to taking my mother’s food parcels with me on periodic train journeys between the two cities, which kept me and my roommates going, albeit for a matter of days.
Eventually, I grew tired of relying on my mother to provide me with our short-lived home comforts and wanted to make them for myself and those around me. I began by recording the recipes of my favourite, easiest dishes, such as stewed fava beans (fuul), peanut salad (salatat dakwa), and mish (spicy yoghurt). The ease with which I learned I could pop out to the local shops to get their ingredients quickly made these dishes staples in our student home.
The main ingredients for making falafel, along with the traditional hand tool used to grind them with chickpeas
After graduating from university, I spent a year at home to complete my training, which provided an excellent opportunity to refine my existing recipes and develop new ones. I began sharing the information I’d gathered on social media and quickly received many encouraging comments from a steadily growing number of followers. It became clear that online access to Sudanese recipes in English was still minimal, and it seemed like many people from all over the world, Sudanese and non-Sudanese alike, were hungry for more.
Encouraged by friends, the online community, and some, but not all, family members, I sought out funding to continue the work I’d started. This materialised in the form of a Kickstarter campaign in 2016, which quickly drew traction and enabled me to make one of many trips to Khartoum to document our cuisine, or at least what I could gather in the capital, Khartoum. These research trips have the potential to be very fruitful if organised well and when connected to reliable sources of information.
However, daily life in Sudan can be a struggle, with necessities like electricity and petrol sometimes in short supply, which impacts the workday and limits productivity. Anyone living in Khartoum and similar cities must accept these shortcomings and either make the best of what's available or reschedule for another day. Thankfully, I was able to gain enough information to establish a solid foundation of material that would become a cookbook. I decided to seek out further funding to cover the entire project, which involved costing the cookbook and writing a proposal.
The streets of Sudan, its proud houses, and the love and warmth they pulse with
I eventually met with the owner of a large company that produces food products and is invested in preserving Sudan’s agricultural and culinary heritage, after a great deal of difficulty. The owner of this company liked my project and accepted my funding proposal. However, securing the funds became another ordeal, marked by numerous back-and-forth communications that went nowhere.
As I began to lose hope with Sudan’s bureaucratic processes, I met a family friend who gave me an attractive proposal. She worked for an international aid organisation that focuses on the provision of food aid, which sought out projects to fund, such as my cookbook idea. The end of their financial year was approaching, and they needed to allocate funding before the end of the year, otherwise it would be lost. She arranged a meeting with the country directors, and I went through my proposal again. It didn’t take much to convince them, as they could immediately see the value of such a project in the short and long term, and began to expedite my proposal through their channels. Having the support of an international aid organisation made a significant impact on the Sudanese company’s processes. It injected a new sense of urgency into financing the project in a timely manner.
The reality is that the project never went through a period of smooth sailing and consistent progress. It felt as if as soon as I’d overcome one challenge, another one was waiting to be resolved just around the corner. The process of gathering the details of the recipes was challenging; deciphering what someone meant by “a bit of this ingredient” and “a little of that ingredient” was particularly laborious and involved a lot of back-and-forth conversations. Then came the recipe testing, which was a gradual process of refining the amounts to be used in the recipes.
Sudanese dishes can be made by following a variety of techniques that give each dish a great variety in its taste, texture and flavours. I decided to only focus on recipes where the ingredients are relatively easy to find and use processes that were easy to follow, so that the recipes can be as accessible as possible.
The container that preserves the kisra made from palm fronds.
The sponsors and I signed the agreement to work on the cookbook one week before the start of the December 2018 revolution. The entire making of this cookbook has been against the backdrop of the most significant shift in Sudan’s political landscape in the past thirty-five years.
The revolution had a significant impact on the project, although we pivoted and persevered through every obstacle that came our way. I recall a fuel shortage coinciding with the start of the revolution, one of the many friction points that exacerbated the people's discontent. I’d organized a field trip with two photographers, Ala Kheir and Duha Mohamed, scheduled while the fuel shortage was taking hold in Khartoum. The following sunrise, we set off in a car to Al Obayed and then onwards to Al Fasher in Darfur, not knowing whether we’d find fuel along the way, but hoping for a safe passage.
In hindsight, I feel so fortunate to have gone on those journeys across Sudan documenting its cuisine. It was a pleasure to travel with Ala and Duha, meeting contacts along the way who became our local guides, taking us to places of interest where I could interview knowledge keepers while Ala and Duha documented our surroundings. We embarked on four separate trips, spanning a few days to over a week, covering all the cardinal points, and discovered interesting facts about the local food culture on each trip.
Regional Culinary Diversity
Western Sudan has arguably the best food in Sudan, based on a colourful history of the Darfur sultanate that gave rise to a rich food culture and sophisticated, elaborate dishes such as boneless whole chicken stuffed with rice and boiled eggs. My favourite dessert is also from this region, kunafa malfufa, cinnamon-infused peanuts and dates stuffed into a crispy homemade pastry.
How to make homemade kunafa using a kunafa cone.
The south of Sudan, including Damazine and Rouseris, boasts an incredible biodiversity, allowing a wide range of ingredients to grow that aren’t found elsewhere in Sudan, such as mushrooms. It turns out mushrooms grow in some dense and moist forests, and locals pick them to make a mushroom stew, which they call zouma, or “boneless chicken stew” since the mushrooms give them the illusion that the stew contains boneless chicken.
Eastern Sudan is known to get many of its influences from neighbouring Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen just across the Red Sea. A well-known eastern dish is called salaat, which is a unique outdoor cooking technique. Lit coals are placed on the floor, then covered with clean, smooth pebbles that eat up quickly and retain the heat. Lightly seasoned pieces of thinly cut lamb and other meats are placed directly on the hot pebbles to cook into tender strips that are traditionally served with unexpected dips that include honey, warm ghee and date paste. Eastern Sudan also shares a thriving coffee culture with neighbouring Eritrea and Ethiopia. Local men routinely carry their coffee apparatus on their person, which allows them to make their daily beverage of choice on the spot and at any time.
The stones used as a stove for cooking the 'Salaat'
Northern Sudan contains many foodways that have filtered down to the rest of the country. Faseekh, a salt-cured fish cooked into a stew with fried onions, tomato juice and peanut butter, is common in northern and central Sudan. Its cousin is a dish that cures the fish for weeks at a time, which is then cooked into a pungent delicacy of the region, known as maluha or tarkeen. The gurasa pancake is a well-known wholemeal wheat flour pancake from the north that is served with stews known as mullah. Date gurasa is another northern Sudanese sweet pancake made with date paste and served with honey and warm ghee.
Droughts, Floods, and Conflict are Reshaping what People Eat and Grow
Sudanese cuisine evolved over centuries and millennia to meet the needs of nomadic life, with iconic dishes such as mullah, a rich gravy stew, and kisra, asida, and gurasa, which are starch-based staples served alongside the rich stew. During times of prosperity, the cuisine drew from regional cuisines and evolved into the dynamic fusion we see today. As such, Sudanese cuisine is relatively adaptable at times of hardship since very few ingredients and stews are required to make foods that can feed a large number of people. During times of natural disasters or man-made conflicts, and even a genocide, the Sudanese people have shown ways of adapting the local cuisine to feed people in need.
A traditional stove for cooking, the “four stones” called al-Ladayat
Meats are generally regarded as a luxury even during stable periods. They may only be available in times of hardship when a group decides to slaughter their livestock out of necessity. A slaughtered animal can make many meals, such as stocks for making mullah which traditionally feed large numbers. Relatively cheap and easy to source ingredients during hardship periods are lentils and black-eyed peas, which are cooked in water and some seasoning ingredients into adas and lubia stews, respectively.
As the most recent conflict has continues for over 2 years, more and more Sudanese sink deeper into food insecurity, resulting in famine being declared in several regions. When people are befallen by this tragic fate, they are forced to eat whatever they can find to survive, which has been known to be wild grass, foraging wild berries and eating animal feed.
Conclusion
Why does the cookbook matter in this moment of cultural destruction and identity war?
The timing of this project is of monumental importance. The work is about archiving a sensitive cultural asset of the country that could be lost. This comes at a time when conflict is actively killing civilians daily, and disproportionately killing those from Western Sudan based on their ethnicity, which amounts to ethnic cleansing.
This abhorrent counter-revolutionary conflict was orchestrated by the warring parties and their overseas backers as a means of punishing the population for rising up against military rule. The active erasure of Sudanese communities over this period is resulting in a great deal of cultural destruction and the potential permanent loss of cultural material.
Projects such as this cookbook aim to counteract this active destruction by archiving traditional recipes and their corresponding food culture in the form of a recipe book and online digital archive.
The book will be discussed at a series of events over the coming weeks and months. Including Manchester; the city that brought about the idea of the cookbook. The events also include a stop in Doha, Qatar for a conference on preserving Sudanese culture at Georgetown University, where the discussion will focus on the reissuing of the Sudan: Retold book, which the Sudanese Kitchen took part in back in 2019.
Learn more about The Sudanese Kitchen on the website and purchase the book from the publisher, AlMas Art Foundation.
