OUT OF AFRICA | Malata, a clam stew from Mozambique  Get ready for a Nigerian P.F. Chang's and Lean Cuisine Lamb Yassa. Prepare to find the foods of sub-Saharan Africa in your strip malls and Safeways. It's inevitable.  My belief in the African Food Inevitability Thesis goes back to an enlightening encounter at the 2009 Winter Fancy Food Show with a food futurist. That is my catchall term for people with titles like "food and flavor analyst," "food trendologist," "director of trend insights" and "menu tracker," who are all part of what you might call the food-future punditocracy.  I was walking the Fancy Food show floor with one such futurist, Kara Nielsen, the "trendologist" for CCD Innovation, a San Francisco-based food research and development firm. We passed a vendor of Malaysian food—a cuisine I had rarely seen—and I excitedly turned to Ms. Nielsen, wondering if this was an incipient find. "It's in the pipeline," she said, matter-of-factly. Another vendor hawked Indonesian food, which I had not seen in the U.S. "It's further off, but it'll come." Cambodian was on the way, too.  "Pad Thai was the gateway," she said. "People ate pad thai, they got interested in Thai food, they explored further." In other words, soft Thai leads to hard Thai, and hard Thai leads to Vietnamese, which leads to Indonesian, and then Filipino. The same thing was happening with the foods of the Americas.  In 1969, the Fancy Food show, the granddaddy of foodie shows, had only 12 international exhibitors. The 2010 show had 30 country pavilions (many with dozens of vendors) and thousands of international food products. You don't need to be a VP of Menu Insights to understand what's happening.  And the appetite for new world cuisines will only grow. Generation Y has an even greater appetite for ethnic novelty than baby boomers or Generation X. They've grown up on pad thai and baba ganoush and sushi—culinary adventure is part of their DNA. They expect to taste ever more diverse cuisines.  There is only one largely unexplored continent left—and it isn't Antarctica. With the exception of North African and Ethiopian cuisine, there has been very little foodie-world attention devoted to the flavors and foods of the world's second-largest continent.  My experiences with Chicago's limited offerings of sub-Saharan African cuisine (Nigerian, Ghanaian and Senegalese) were not particularly delicious. Sure, I liked lamb yassa (grilled lamb marinated in mustard powder, vinegar and lemon juice), egusi soup (a spicy Nigerian mix based on ground melon seeds), baobab juice and pineapple fritters, but there were some painful encounters with mystery meats (oxtail, goat) and fufu, a large white blob of cassava that looks like cream of wheat and tastes like raw sourdough.  Of course, you can't judge the cuisine of an entire continent by a handful of experiences. My first encounters with Chinese and Mexican food weren't love-at-first-bite either. It was Marcus Samuelsson, the Swedish-Ethiopian über-chef, and his book "The Soul of a New Cuisine" that expanded my mind about Africa.  "The Soul of a New Cuisine" has a consciousness-changing agenda. Mr. Samuelsson displays 200 recipes with gastro-porno photos—barbecued snapper from West Africa, curried trout with coconut chili sauce from Kenya, apple squash fritters from South Africa, monstrous red papayas, glistening mango couscous. He goes to the ancient markets of Dakar and Addis Ababa, to the beaches of Zanzibar. We learn the origins of Cape Malay cuisine, visit Nelson Mandela's favorite restaurant in Soweto. It was pretty much impossible to look at the book and not develop an appetite—and a raging curiosity about the possibilities of African food.  One night, after reading about sugar-cane drinks and fresh lobster skewers, I started cooking. I made a spicy okra salad, grilled shrimp piri piri and steamed vanilla pudding. The next night, Zanzibari pizzas—chapati stuffed with eggs, meat and spices. Later, I had a Mozambican seafood stew with Senegalese-style jollof rice. I started seeing it.  “We've grown up on pad thai and baba ganoush—adventure is in our DNA. We expect to taste ever more diverse cuisines.”  Other factors point to a pan-African influx. Africa has one billion people and more than 500 cultures. Laurens van der Post, who published an Africa cookbook in 1970, conceded the hubris of his endeavor, writing that it was as preposterous as a single cookbook for all of Europe.  As fast-growing African nations become more prosperous, they will develop something that is rare right now—a middle class with disposable time and income. Poverty, hunger, war and sickness are why Africans—from Cameroon to Mozambique to Namibia to Congo—have been unable to develop a baobab-infused vinaigrette. You can't afford the luxury of culinary adventure when you're struggling to protect and feed yourself.  It will take a while, but African cuisine will arrive. Bring on the fufu.  Chef Marcus Samuelsson, born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden, explores the dishes of Africa in his cookbook "The Soul of a New Cuisine." Here are two recipes from the book.  Muna, an acquaintance from Libya, tells of visiting her aunt back home and sitting outside with her and the neighborhood women as they made couscous. She described the hypnotic process of the women rolling semolina dough in their hands, crumbling it into smaller chunks with their fingers, then rubbing the crumbs into smaller pieces until they were the right size. They made huge batches at a time, laying the grains in the sun to dry, then steaming them and drying them again. Fortunately, commercially made couscous is easy to find in stores and of very high quality, so you can enjoy this lovely dish without spending days preparing the grains.  2 tablespoons olive oil, divided  1 mango, peeled, pitted and cut into 1-inch cubes (about 1 cup)  1 jalapeño chili, seeds and ribs removed, finely chopped  1/4 cup loosely packed small cilantro sprigs, chopped  1/4 cup loosely packed small parsley sprigs, chopped  Prepare the couscous according to the package directions. Set aside.  Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Add the garlic, mango and jalapeño and sauté until the mango begins to color lightly. Stir in the remaining tablespoon of olive oil, the couscous, raisins, tomato, lime juice, cilantro and parsley and toss to heat through. Season with salt.  Serve hot or at room temperature.  A restaurant kitchen can be a virtual United Nations, with a staff made up of people from around the world. A dishwasher at Aquavit who comes from Mali told me about the typical midday meal he had growing up: peanut stew made with onion, tomatoes and spinach served over rice. His description was the starting point for this peanuty stew, an elegant interpretation of a dish eaten throughout West Africa every day.  2 medium white onions, sliced  2 carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch pieces  2 Scotch bonnet chilies, cut in half, seeds and ribs removed  One 3-inch piece ginger, peeled and sliced  4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, each cut into 4 pieces  4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, each cut into 4 pieces  2 baking potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes  4 tomatoes, cut into quarters, or 2 cups roughly chopped canned tomatoes  1 pound spinach, tough stems removed, washed  Combine the onions, carrots, chilies, ginger, bay leaves, peppercorns and water in a medium pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium, add the chicken thighs, and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes. Add the chicken breasts and simmer for another 10 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through.  While the chicken is simmering, toast the peanuts in a small dry sauté pan over medium heat until golden brown and fragrant. Let cool, then grind 1 cup of the toasted peanuts in a blender to a smooth paste. Set aside.  Using tongs, remove the chicken from the cooking liquid and set aside. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the vegetables to a food processor; discard the bay leaves. Purée the vegetables until smooth. Set the broth aside.  Heat the oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat. When it begins to shimmer, add the potatoes and sauté until they are golden brown, about 10 minutes. Add the chicken pieces and brown them on all sides, about 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat.  Stir the vegetable purée into the broth and bring to a boil. Add the peanut purée and the remaining cup of whole peanuts and whisk until well combined. Add the tomatoes, chicken and potatoes and simmer until heated through, about 5 minutes.  Remove from the heat and season with the salt. Add the spinach and stir until the spinach is wilted.  Reprinted with permission from "Soul of a New Cuisine" by Marcus Samuelsson (Wiley).  A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C2 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Next Stop for Food Fanatics: Africa.
What's on the culinary horizon? Egusi soup, Kenyan curried trout and other dishes from a booming continent, writes Josh Schonwald.