Uprooted from Nigeria, Yewande Komolafe returns 20 years later with a new cookbook

Reconnection can be a process. It was for Yewande Komolafe. After leaving Nigeria as a teenager, she returned 20 years later. Yewande evoked memories through cooking and was quickly reminded that sourcing ingredients meant enlisting mentors and a web of social relations. Using these ingredients came with a sacred knowledge passed down through oral histories. She shares them with us in her cookbook My Everyday Lagos: Nigerian Cooking at Home and in the Diaspora.

Evan Kleiman: I'm so grateful that you're here with us. The book is really beautiful. It's so visually lively and your stories are lovely. 

Yewande Komolafe: Well, thank you so much. I wanted to inject the energy of Lagos into the book, so that makes sense. Thank you for saying that. 

Give us an overview of your background. Your parents are in Lagos. When did you come to the US?

I moved to the US when I was 16. I moved here to go to college and I have essentially been here ever since. I built a life here. I finished college, went to culinary art school, worked in restaurants and now I work as a columnist and a food writer at the New York Times.

Would you be willing to share the emotional and political challenges that you faced during your first few years living here?

Wow, I'm only just connecting the dots. I think that I moved here so young and it's really taken a while for that to sink in. Now, I have kids of my own and I just can't imagine sending them off across the world at 16. Emotionally, I think I shut down. I think I did not allow myself to feel. I just decided that I was here to do a thing and I put my head down and I did it. It's not until recently, I would say about five years ago, that I started processing all the things that had happened. 

I lived undocumented for 10 years. Working in food, I just didn't see voices like mine being represented. I didn't see stories like mine represented. I didn't know anybody else that was undocumented while I worked in food. When I tell my story and when I share my story, I'm hoping that it touches someone else who might be going through similar things, and it validates them because that's what it did for me, to say it out loud, "I'm undocumented. I'm an immigrant." To say things like that out loud, validated it for me and helped me know that it wasn't just in my head. It's something that I'm actually going through.

Yewande Komolafe moved to the US from Nigeria when she was 16, living undocumented for 10 years. "Emotionally, I shut down," she says. Photo by Kelly Marshall.

You started doing a dinner series from your home in Brooklyn. How did you interlace themes of home and adaptation into that series? And what was the role of memory?

I started doing the dinner series because I wanted to feel a connection to Nigeria. Food is the way I explain, I examine, I move through the world. It helps me understand the world. So I turned to food. I turned, specifically, to Nigerian food because I had worked in all these fancy restaurants — French restaurants and Korean restaurants and all these other cuisines — and I had never really examined my own food. It was always something that I carried with me and it was always something that I had, but I never really thought of it as something that I should examine. 

So at that point in my life, I was trying to connect desperately with Nigeria, because I hadn't been back in so long. I had been asking myself questions like, "Am I still Nigerian, if I haven't been there?" The theme of what it means to move and uproot yourself and make a home in a new space, what it means to share your cuisine with others, what it means to be Nigerian, all of those were things that I was actively exploring in my own personal life. So it made its way into the dinner series. I would throw that question out at the guest and we'd have a lively conversation and have different narratives. It brought a lot of nuance into a conversation, for me.

So you hadn't gone back to Lagos in a really long time. Can you paint a picture of it for us and talk about how it had changed when you went back after 17 years?

That was another experience that I couldn't process while I was going through it. I hopped on a plane, went to Lagos with my husband, met my parents there and we had a two-week period where we were just going to all these places that I had been going to when I was little. What I remember the most was how lively Lagos is. I think I forgot about that aspect of Lagos. It's so lively. There's loud music, there's traffic, there's people, colors, food. I had forgotten that aspect of Lagos. It was so rich in culture and people, and it felt like my senses were on fire. I couldn't shut it down until I had to actively remove myself from the space. That was my favorite memory of being back in Lagos for the first time.

Let's talk about food. What are some of the core components and essential flavors of Nigerian cuisine?

We love strong flavors. We love rich flavors. So I would say red palm oil, which gives a floral, bright orange hue to our dishes. I would say crayfish, which is a type of dried shrimp, that gives it a nice umami flavor. I'd say fermented locust bean, which is also an umami flavor. And I'd say spice. Depending on what region you're from, spices can differ from nice and woodsy or grassy or spicy as in heat. I would say that all of those are core flavors of Nigerian cooking.

Ekuru appears to be a good entry point to Nigerian cooking. Can you describe the dish and how it is served?

Yeah, ekuru is a white steamed bean dish. Honey beans are soaked and the skins peeled off. Then, the beans are ground into a paste and that paste is combined with some onions and some crayfish, wrapped in water lily leaves, and steamed. It's firmer than a custard but not as firm as a cake, if that makes sense. It's a nice light entryway into the cuisine. It's one of the foods that we serve in the morning. 

We don't really have breakfast foods, we just have foods that we serve in the morning that are light on your digestion. So it's one of those foods. It's really light on your digestion. It's served with ògi, which is a fermented corn pudding. That's my favorite way to eat it, to have ekuru and a bowl of ògi and kind of do a dip in the ògi.

You mentioned the idea of breakfast foods. Could you elaborate on buka culture in the absence of our traditional ideas of breakfast, lunch and dinner?

A buka is basically a place streetside that serves a wide range of dishes for lunch. They would usually serve dishes like rice and stew for a weekday lunch. It's a place where you go, have lunch, then go back to the office. They're little shacks by the roadside or they have dining spaces. A notable thing about bukas is they're typically roadside and they serve lunch cuisine, like rice and stew. You would see amala with gbegìrì. You could sometimes see pounded yam but I feel like that's more of a celebration weekend meal. You would see èwà agoyin, which is a bean dish that's cooked for hours until the beans melt into a sort of soup with onions, and it's topped with a fiery chili paste. Fried plantains you would see at bukas. But buka culture is lunch culture.

Gosh, that sounds so delicious. Let's talk about some of your family's cooking. What is your father's specialty in the kitchen?

My dad used to make several versions of a fisherman's soup or stew. He calls his àlapa, which is not the traditional name for it, I found while I was doing the research for the book. It's a really nice brothy soup, where he makes these dumplings from yam and puts them into the soup to thicken it. He loved seafood and he used to work on Lagos Island. On his way back from the island, on Fridays, he would buy some fresh fish then on Friday night or Saturday, he would make this brothy soup. So fisherman's stew and àlapa are both two things that my dad was a great cook on.

I love that. Then Sunday was chicken day in your family's house. Your mother had her own dish.

Clay pot chicken Sunday. I grew up on a farm in the city because my dad loved being surrounded by green and farm animals. Imagine being in the middle of Brooklyn in New York City [and having] a working farm with pigs and chickens and goats. I didn't realize how different that was until I moved here. We had live animals. Sunday was the day that we would get a chicken from the garden and have it for dinner. My mom would bring out her clay pot and put the chicken in it with all these spices and make some rice from some coconut rice. She had this special seasoning that she would put on the chicken. The first time I went back, she made that. It was a whole Sunday ritual. She made that and it made me think of how sweet it was for her to do that.

I understand that your mother was a food scientist and she worked for Cadbury. 

Yes, she did. 

So you grew up with chocolate in the house.

I did. I grew up with chocolate and five-pound bags of assorted candies. She would get all these things in the mail. I just thought that's how kids grew up but it's obviously not. My mom was a food scientist and a lot of my early introduction to food was definitely through her.

Do you have a favorite Cadbury bar?

I like Curly Wurly.

I love Curly Wurly.

Yeah, I like Curly Wurly.

I feel bad that American kids don't know what Curly Wurly is. It's so good. So if people have never made Nigerian food before, and for this question, we are going to remove jollof from the answer... 

Yes, please. 

Ata dín dín, a red pepper relish, is used as a base in many Nigerian dishes. Photo by Kelly Marshall.

What would be the first dish that you would have people make from My Everyday Lagos?

I would have them make the ata dìn dìn because that's a pepper relish that I use as a base in a lot of dishes. It's red bell peppers, onions, garlic, ginger, oil, and salt. I use that on everything. If you are making jollof rice, it's the base for that. If you're making my braised goat and stew, it's the base for that. So it's the base for a lot of dishes in My Everyday Lagos. It's also good on its own. It's a pepper relish that you can put on top of eggs, you can put on top of steamed rice, you can eat with spaghetti, if the spirit calls you. You could really do anything with it. It's something you can add to dishes that you already have on hand or it's a base for more dishes in My Everyday Lagos.

Yewande Komolafe connects the dots of her past in "My Everyday Lagos."  Photo courtesy of Ten Speed Press.