The Whole World Eats Fufu

Fufu is the only truly pan-African dish. If you ask some bitter African emigres I know, it's the only African dish, period.

Fitting for humanity's mother continent, fufu is grounded, earthy, and rooty. Literally! You pound yams or other tubers (sometimes maize) until they utterly give up, texturally, and are transformed into a jiggling blob of starchy ectoplasm. Tear off a wisp, dunk it into the "soup" (the broad term for whatever's not fufu), and eat. If you're living large, you might have been served morsels of protein to grab up, as well.

It's all performed with thumb and first two fingers, so it's messy work—though Congolese serve a dainty little bowl of water—but kind of fun. Kind of different. And while Japanese won't blink twice at your chopstick prowess, nor can you ever hope to impress an Italian with your spaghetti wrangling, white people deftly consuming fufu can draw an entire village of awed spectators.

So you need to be careful not to mess up. A fine point distinguishes natives from tourists: you must never chew fufu. Chewing fufu is as pointless as chewing water. It marks you as a clown. Just let the fufu glide down your throat, suppressing any chewing urge. Because there's nothing to chew.

Fufu has been part of my life since the 1980s. At this point, it's as familiar as reaching for my nutcracker in a Maryland crab house or scooping Lebanese mezza with pita bits. It's a familiar groove, though a whole other thing. But it's hard to explain to people, because it seems strange and foreign.

I was feeling disoriented eating the meal in the above photo because it was half finger-food (fufu + beany soup) and half fork/knife food (roast fish, plantains, tomato/onion salad). I felt an impulse to just dump the soup over the mound of (corn) fufu and work it with my fork. Sort of like mashed potatoes. Suddenly I realized, in a flash: holy crap, MASHED POTATOES ARE FUFU.

I called over the chef, a Senegalese Brazilian living in Portugal, and shared my epiphany.

"You know mashed potatoes, like the French eat?"

"Yeah, sure."

"It's fufu!"

"What do you mean, 'it's fufu'?" she frowned.

"IT'S FUFU! It's totally fufu!" I enthused. And her eyes began to spark.

"The whole world eats fufu!" I whispered.

"The whole world eats fufu," she replied thoughtfully, examining the words as she spoke them, and ambled back to the kitchen, lost in thought.