Book review: Saka Saka by Anto Cocagne and Aline Princet

Saka Saka gives delightful recipes from Sub-Saharan Africa, with bright colours and even brighter flavours

Bright flavours are matched by the even brighter colours of this recipe book. From cover to cover pages are adorned with prints and patterns alongside highly-saturated images of each dish. Anto Cocagne and Aline Princet have put together an adventure in African cooking south of the Sahara, and aim to dispel any misconceptions about the diverse and delicious cuisine.

Saka Saka works for both those new to Sub-Saharan cooking and those more experienced, taking you through essentials for your pantry if you don’t know where to start, then leading onto recipes from different regions, split into sections: bases and starters, mains, sides, street food, desserts and drinks. For each section there are portraits of artists from different countries in Africa, showing their lives and their favourite Sub-Saharan African dishes.

The book begins with bases – flavourful pastes that are featured in many of the recipes. For example, there is the green nokoss, which pairs with fish and crustaceans and is made from green peppers and green chilli along with herbs and aromatics. These bases can be used for creating recipes in Saka Saka, or can be carried through to your own cooking for new and interesting flavours.

Chef Anto’s tips on every page make the recipes accessible to all, as well as markers on indicating the difficulty level and times for preparation and cooking, so that you can begin at the easier end of the spectrum and work your way up. For example, the banana fritters are a dish that can be offered as a sharing dessert, or the pèpè soup, a fish and crustacean broth affair, provides an introduction to classic West African flavours.

The vast majority of dishes in Saka Saka are naturally gluten free, taking carbohydrates from tubers such as cassava and cornmeal rather than wheat.

This book showcases the incredible variety of Sub-Saharan cuisine, and pays a wonderful tribute to pan-African culture, which will no doubt act as a guide to any chef wanting to discover more about the continent.

Saka Saka by Anto Cocagne and Aline Princet (Murdoch Books, £25)