Seventy recipes from across Africa, and not one of them requires an apology for being plant-based. Jane Nshuti — a Rwandan-Congolese chef now based in Cape Town — has written the kind of cookbook that makes the category seem redundant. The food is what it is: amaranth leaf stew from South Africa, spicy cassava from Rwanda, jollof rice from Ghana, Moroccan tagines.
Tamu is organised by region — South, East, West, and North Africa — and each section carries personal reflections that ground the recipes in specific kitchens, specific memories, specific women who cooked this way because it was how food was cooked.
Where Yotam Ottolenghi brought Middle Eastern vegetables to a Western audience by making them spectacular, Nshuti brings African plant cooking by making it familiar — familiar in the sense of family, not in the sense of already known.
A book that smells of the continent even on a cold evening in a kitchen far from it.
