We know well the history and hardships of the African continent: a few strains and thousands of tribes scattered over an area of ​​about 30 million square kilometers, which have paid a bitter duty to the evolution of the Western world, experiencing equal treatment in every corner of their land wild and sunny.
As well as the people and the nature, the kitchen was affected by European settlement, which has its roots even before the eighteenth century.
Arabs and Portuguese, Chinese and Indians, mostly merchants and adventurers, had already invaded the coast and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, when the Old Continent decided to pitch tents in the forests, on the edge of the desert, at the foot of the mountains and the highlands, after working up the rivers and have discovered lakes and waterfalls. Years later the paths by the explorers would become groomed trails from the first off-road, the savannah would be divided by the railway and the first airports would have appeared.
Yet in much of the lunch and dinner were the same as when the white man did not exist. A bowl of rice, a piece of meat nearly charred by a rudimentary barbecue, a handful of polenta to work with your hands and dip in a poor sauce, a cup of tea that seems dirty water, infested by insects. This is the image that often leads us back to the African food. Impossible not to think about world hunger, famine, poverty and climatic and geological conditions that affect the lives of millions of people.
The traditional iconography of the child begging tourists, unfortunately, is still present but is giving way, fortunately, the onset of awareness of a continent in developing (albeit slowly and with its new problems), which He tries to shake off the constraints of history and the kind of fatalism that caused the secular submission.
Through the kitchen, we can appreciate how humility, exploitation of primary resources and satisfaction of the palate can marry with harmony and refinement.
The East Africa and sub-equatorial, for example, is rich in natural products and there are the basic elements of nourishment. We can certainly say that in Kenya, for example, only missing the olive oil between the main ingredients of world gastronomy (but also the Chinese, among the most diverse and important in the world, they do not).
In South Africa they produce excellent wine, rated among the best ever of our planet, the fertile waters of the Indian Ocean teeming with every variety of fish and shellfish; fruit trees, mostly tropical, have allowed grafts and created plantations of Mediterranean products, in addition to the local sweet.
On this page you will find a vision then three hundred and sixty degrees of the Eastern African cuisine, from typical dishes to tribal changes over time by the Arabs and Indians, until the contamination that over the past fifty years he mixed Anglo-Saxon conception of the sauce with Middle Eastern spices, the cuisine of Mediterranean fish with strong Indian flavors, the French and Italian sophistication with the needs of a people accustomed to consider food as a tasteless, needed, simple daily biological needs.
As already pinned the writer Ernest Hemingway, who loved to stay in Kenya and Tanzania, you will see that enjoy the beautiful fruits that this land offers, and - we would add - mixing them with taste, seem more than just a special dinner will mean taste our origins, our roots, the closest thing there is to Mother Nature, the human being. Without giving up the pleasure of good food and discover the exoticism in the kitchen.