The History of Porridge in Bantuphone Africa, with Words as Main Ingredients
The historical comparative-linguistic analysis of Bantu culinary vocabulary reveals that the stiff porridge widely consumed in Central and Southern Africa today as principal starch food was already known to the first Bantu speech communities. The preparation method changed over time. The early Bantu...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/afriques, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Afriques
2015
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | The historical comparative-linguistic analysis of Bantu culinary vocabulary reveals that the stiff porridge widely consumed in Central and Southern Africa today as principal starch food was already known to the first Bantu speech communities. The preparation method changed over time. The early Bantu speakers prepared porridge as a mash from yams and later from plantains. The Proto-East and Proto-Southwest Bantu speech communities knew cereals and made porridge from cereal flour. When cassava was introduced after the Columbian Exchange, this cereal preparation was applied to a tuber in Central Africa. Many communities living in the northwest of the Bantuphone region, however, never adopted the preparation of flour porridge. Moreover, in many communities living in the equatorial rainforest, porridge— be it from cereals or other crops—never attained status as the staple and remained one of many starch food preparations. |
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