Ozoz Sokoh has spent decades exploring and celebrating the culinary history of Nigeria, the country of her birth. She has traced the cuisine’s influences on the diaspora, from Brazil to the American South, and delved into its connections with other West African cuisines. And since 2008, she has documented her findings on her Kitchen Butterfly blog.
Now, with the release of her heartfelt debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria, Sokoh is stepping out from behind the screen – and deservedly so. This meticulously researched tome, featuring more than 100 classic Nigerian recipes from all six of the country’s regions, took five years to complete. That’s not including Sokoh’s lifetime of learning – and relearning – countless dishes and generation-spanning traditions. “In Nigeria, food is a love language,” says Sokoh, who now teaches food and tourism studies at Centennial College in Scarborough, Ont.
As we dig into her early childhood memories, she is quick to share that her culinary adventures have come a long way.
Until her palate opened up, the only thing Ozoz Sokoh liked to eat growing up were cubes of sugar.
Looking back
As a child, Sokoh barely ate. “The only thing I liked was sugar,” she says with a laugh. “I would hide behind the curtains and eat cube after cube. My dinner would end up at the back of the deep freezer. When my parents cleaned, they would be like, ‘What?’”
A trip to Edinburgh in the summer of 1985 changed everything. The long walk down Princes Street left the nine-year-old Sokoh so hungry that she devoured burger after burger at the retro fast-food chain Wimpy. “My father was shocked,” she recalls.
Once her palate opened up, there was no turning back.
Throughout her childhood in Warri and Port Harcourt, both in southern Nigeria, Sokoh absorbed culinary knowledge from her parents, whether it was watching them stir a pot of bright red stew in their home kitchen or raiding their sideboard jam-packed with condiments as they tucked into a meal at the dining table.
While her marine engineer father loved kitchen gadgets, including a popcorn maker and a SodaStream machine, her mother – the proprietor of a nursery and elementary school – was an avid recipe collector who enjoyed tinkering with Nigerian-style fried rice. “Every Sunday she’d make it in a different way,” says Sokoh, adding that she sees herself in lots of the things her mother would do. “I’d watch her change and tweak one ingredient at a time, so it was a very scientific process, even though she didn’t document it. Each time, it would taste a little bit different, but she always understood why she was doing it and what she was doing. It was very fascinating to me.”
Trial and error
While attending university in England, Sokoh realized she didn’t have recipes for many of the foods she loved. She was especially nostalgic for a ruby-red drink called Chapman. “Growing up, we never made it at home – you could get it in every country club, every restaurant, every bar.” So, during a visit back to Nigeria in 1998, she asked a bartender to write it down.
“That was one of my earliest recipes, and I still make it in a similar way today,” Sokoh says. “I didn’t realize the need for recipes until there wasn’t that community of guidance to help me recreate them the way I remembered. So that was my first experience with food as comfort and meeting more than a belly-functional need.”
When she began developing recipes for media outlets such as the website Serious Eats, Sokoh had to figure out how to clearly communicate techniques that rarely came with an explanation from elders. Take, for example, her recipe for moin moin, a steamed bean cake, whose preparation involves stirring warm oil into the batter. To understand the reasoning behind this, she reverse-engineered the recipe, examining similar practices from different cultures.
Next came a series of questions and tests to understand exactly what oil tempering does to moin moin’s structure and how the batter holds together with and without oil.
“Now that I have this recipe-development approach, I can figure out the ‘whys’ easier. I can put a lot of the things my parents did into context,” Sokoh says.
Generation Next
Her cookbook, with gorgeous photography and many handy tips, is the kind that will teach you something new every time you pick it up.
But the solo parent didn’t put it together all by herself. Her three teenage children were instrumental in selecting the final recipes and providing feedback during the studio photography sessions. “My children are immensely proud. I couldn’t have done it without them,” Sokoh says.
“It always surprises me how thoughtful and honest they are in ways I didn’t have the courage to be when I was younger,” she adds. “I remember putting a table of contents together and they’d be like, ‘How can you write a Nigerian cookbook and it doesn’t have a recipe for stewed gizzards and gizdodo? Nah!’ So that process was super helpful.”
Sokoh’s love of home cooking has transferred to all of her children. “The minute we’re all at home together, they’re bringing out the cookbooks,” she says, citing Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, Ever-Green Vietnamese: Super-Fresh Recipes Starring Plants from Land and Sea by Andrea Nguyen, The Desperate Housewives Cookbook and TikTok as sources of inspiration.
Like her parents before her, she has taught her children how to shop for ingredients and be handy in the kitchen, and the effort seems to have paid off. “I kind of put my feet up, you know?” she says. “We spend a lot of time in the kitchen, even just sitting and chatting while one person is cooking, and we’re all there, hanging around at the dining table.”
As idyllic as these dinnertime rituals sound today, according to Sokoh, those traditions were almost lost. “Living in different cultures can make you forget,” she says. When residing in Holland, the young parent wasn’t calling on past experiences for her meal preparation; it was about doing whatever she could to help her family function. As soon as she had the capacity to pass on the love and lessons taught at her childhood table, she vowed to do so often as possible.
With so few classic Nigerian cookbooks in existence, Chop Chop is also about legacy. “I had to write it for my children, who are global citizens but may not necessarily have access to the breadth of what I’ve been fortunate to try,” Sokoh says. “I find lots of people gift me recipes and knowledge that I would not have had access to otherwise. They’re like, ‘Ozoz, we know you’d appreciate this.’ That’s just beautiful.”
Six recipes for a Nigerian feast
Excerpted from Chop Chop by Ozoz Sokoh, published by Appetite by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
