The Brixton-based chef behind Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen rediscovered her heritage through cooking. Here she talks family, food and identity – and shares two recipes from her new cookbook
Zoe Adjonyoh’s dad gave her precisely one cooking lesson, when she was 10 years old. “How do you know when it’s done?” she asked, straining to catch a glimpse of the stove. Zoe liked to hover close to him when he cooked, enthralled by the sights and smells of the Ghanaian ingredients he would bring back from the market to his south-east London home. There was grilled tilapia, fermented corn dough called kenkey, and vats of stew, laced with fiery ginger and Scotch bonnet pepper. As the pan on the hob sputtered, spicy tomato sauce flew up the wall behind the stove. “How do you know when it’s done?” she repeated. He threw an arm out to the oil and sauce spatters peppering the wall: “When it’s up there, it’s done!”
If you are what you eat, then Adjonyoh’s debut cookbook, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen, is a kind of edible portrait: a celebratory, intelligent, often chaotic rendering of the person she is, and of her heritage. The daughter of a Ghanaian father and Irish mother, Adjonyoh is a woman anchored in two worlds. Both sides of her family have food at the heart of their culture, and that passion for feeding comes through. “Probably 50% of the book is pretty straight-up traditional dishes,” she says. “The other half is my reinterpretation of some of those things.” She bounces from mashed yam and plantain pancakes to a “Ghana-fied Caesar salad”, weaving the recipes together with smart pr ose, thoughtful ingredient glossaries and, most compellingly, the story of how, at nearly 40 years old, she has rediscovered her roots.
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