The Atlantic moved ingredients, not recipes

Our diaspora recipes dataset now holds 33 dishes, 17 from Africa and 16 from the Caribbean. The obvious way to read a collection like that is as a before and after: the food went across on the ships, and the Caribbean half is what became of the African half. Line the two columns up and that is not what you see. Almost none of them are the same dish twice.

What crossed was smaller and more durable than a recipe. A leaf. A seed. The knowledge of how long to cook something and what to do with the pot afterwards. Dishes were rebuilt on the other side out of whatever was to hand, which is why the Caribbean column reads as its own cuisine rather than a copy of anything.

One plant, dated to the year

Ackee is the exception that proves how rare the exception is. It is native to the forests of West Africa and takes its English name from the Akan word akye fufo, still spoken in Ghana 🇬🇭. It arrived in Jamaica 🇯🇲 in 1778 aboard a slave ship, and we know that because Hortus Eastensis, a botanical catalogue of the Liguanea garden published in 1794, wrote it down. Very few food plants have their transatlantic journey recorded to the year.

The name attached to it belongs to someone else entirely. Captain William Bligh carried specimens from Jamaica 🇯🇲 to Kew in 1793, and the fruit was later named Blighia sapida in his honour, though Bligh had nothing to do with bringing it to the island in the first place. The plant that made the journey is credited to the man who made the return trip.

Then the reversal. Ackee became the centre of Jamaica's national breakfast, eaten with saltfish, and it is a minor food in the region it came from, used in parts of Côte d'Ivoire 🇨🇮 and Burkina Faso 🇧🇫 but far more often as medicine or soap than as dinner. It also became one of the most heavily regulated foods in the world: the unripe fruit contains hypoglycin A, which causes Jamaican Vomiting Sickness, and the United States 🇺🇸 banned imports of the raw fruit in 1973 on those grounds. Only ackee that has opened its red pod by itself is safe to eat.

What crossed as technique

The clearest inheritances in the collection are methods rather than meals. Waakye is a northern Ghanaian 🇬🇭 rice and bean dish whose name is a contraction of the Hausa shinkafa da wake, meaning exactly that, and something very close to it is the likely ancestor of the rice and bean dishes found across the Caribbean and South America. Jamaica's rice and peas is what that idea became after it met coconut milk, thyme, pimento and Scotch bonnet. It is not waakye. It is what waakye turned into.

Callaloo is the same story told with a leaf. The dasheen leaf crossed the Atlantic along with the knowledge of how to cook it down, and in Trinidad 🇹🇹 it became a silky green stew with okra, coconut milk, pumpkin and crab. In Jamaica 🇯🇲 the same word attached itself to a completely different plant, amaranth, served dry as a side. One name, two dishes, divided by which island you are standing on.

Traffic ran the other way too, and it is easy to miss. Ndole is Cameroon's 🇨🇲 national dish, built on wild bitterleaf from the Littoral coast, and the groundnuts that give it its richness arrived in West Africa from the Americas along Atlantic trade routes in the 16th and 17th centuries. The dish most associated with Cameroonian weddings depends on an ingredient that came the wrong way up the same route.

What did not cross at all

Jollof stayed in West Africa. It descends from Senegal's 🇸🇳 thieboudienne, created in 19th-century Saint-Louis and attributed by oral tradition to Penda Mbaye, a cook at the colonial governor's residence who used broken rice when barley ran short. It spread east across the region and became the subject of an argument between Nigeria 🇳🇬 and Ghana 🇬🇭 that has outlasted several governments. It did not become a Caribbean dish. Neither did injera, nor koshari, nor suya.

Meanwhile a third of the Caribbean column arrived from somewhere else entirely. Curry goat is a legacy of Indian indenture: roughly 36,000 labourers were brought to Jamaica 🇯🇲 between 1845 and 1917, and curry technique came with them. Doubles was invented in 1936 in Princes Town, southern Trinidad 🇹🇹, by Emamool Deen and Rasulan Ali, descendants of indentured labourers, adapting the North Indian chole bhature to a bicycle cart. Guyana's 🇬🇾 pepperpot is older than any of it, built on cassareep from bitter cassava by the Indigenous Arawak, and preserved by the Dutch and British who adopted it.

Africa's own column has the same complication. Bobotie is South Africa's 🇿🇦 national dish, its oldest recorded recipe printed in a Dutch cookbook in 1609, and it was shaped by Cape Malay cooks, people enslaved and brought from Java and the Indonesian archipelago to the Cape Colony from 1658. Bunny chow is Indian food that became South African. The neat map of African origin and Caribbean destination does not survive contact with either list.

Two dishes that became law

Two entries in the collection were recognised by UNESCO in the same month, December 2021. Senegal's 🇸🇳 ceebu jen was inscribed, which settles the question of where jollof comes from even though it will settle no arguments about who cooks it best. Haiti's 🇭🇹 soup joumou was inscribed on the same list, and it was Haiti's 🇭🇹 first.

Soup joumou is the one dish in the dataset whose meaning is entirely political. Enslaved Haitians cooked the squash soup for enslavers and were forbidden to eat it. On 1 January 1804, having defeated Napoleon's forces in the only successful slave revolution in history, they ate it. Every New Year's Day since, Haitian families at home and abroad cook enormous pots of it and give it away to neighbours and strangers.

The names are worth following too. Akye fufo, shinkafa da wake, ceebu jen, joumou: four languages, four naming systems, and the words survived the crossing more reliably than the recipes did. Our African languages dataset covers what happened to the writing that carried them.