ABSTRACT
Their manner of cooking is quite different from ours. They bake nothing, but all their food is boiled or fried in earthen pots. Various kinds of bread of corn and peas are fried in palm oil or tree-butter. Sometimes they cook Indian corn in whole grains, like our 'big hominy' but the usual preparation of corn is the ekkazu . . . Meat is always cut fine to be cooked. Sometimes it is stewed, but it is usually made into palave sauce which the Yorubus call obbeh, by stewing up a small quantity of flesh or fish with a large proportion of vegetables, highly seasoned with onions and red pepper. Obbeh, with ekkaw or boiled yam, pounded or impounded, is the customary diet of all classes, from the king to the slave. They take three meals a day, breakfast a little after sunrise, dinner about twelve, and supper after dark. No people are so much in the habit of eating in the streets, where women are always engaged in preparing all sorts of dishes for sale to passers by. Their usual drink is water. Tea and coffee are unknown, but hot ekkaw, diluted to the consistence of gruel is much used as a morning beverage. The women make beautiful malt, and passably good beer, of Indian corn and millet. In many parts of the interior, palm-wine is very scarce and highly prized. (T. J. Bowen, Central Africa, Charleston, Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1857, p. 300.)
The staple food of the Yoruba is the yam, but there is regional variation, and in some areas yams are less important than other crops. Yams are the most desirable of the vegetables, but because of the prestige associated with serving them, they may be reserved for social occasions while in private the family relies on cassava, taro, or maize. This point is implied in the Yoruba proverb, 'Igba dodo li agbado igbani9 (Corn is the support of a people'). The staple food and the relative importance of yams in the diet varies also with economic
74 Some Yoruba Ways with Yams
means; in Ife the poor can rarely, if ever, afford to eat yams. A large number of varieties are recognized, most of which are also classed as 'white yams', 'yellow yams' or 'water yams'. Although new yams have been introduced from other parts of the world since first contact with the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 'white yams', of which there are the greatest number of varieties, are native to Africa. Yams are boiled, mashed in two forms, steamed in three forms, fried and made into fritters, flour, porridge and a loaf and mixed with other loaves or masked with other vegetables.
