Breakfast in Ghana and Afro-Jewish America or the Strange Career of Rice and Milk

Some of my best moments in Ghana have come about from discovering linkages between Ghanaians and Black America. Like the time I discovered that Ghanaian women sell what African Americans call "corn bread"--a Soul Food staple.

This is one of those stories...or so I thought.

Porridge

Porridge is an odd word to my black American ear. It is not used much in American English. It sounds like an old-fashioned word for hot breakfast cereal. But the word enjoys common usage among Ghanaians who were colonized more recently by the Brits.


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Young women at Haatso preparing kose (bottom pot) and brofru (top pot. brofru is sorta like a plain donut).The koko is out of the frame. You can just make out a group men in the
top right of the frame.They are buying waakye (Hausa: black eyed peas and rice)
Photo by Kwame Zulu Shabazz

It took me some time to get use to the old-fashioned name, but I have always loved breakfast in Ghana. My typical routine in West Legon was to wake up around 6 am and do a bit of reading. Before 7 am I would wander down to Haatso (pronounced HA-choh) junction (see map of Haatso above), buy a Daily Graphic (Ghana's paper of record) and a bowl of koko. 

As I understand it, koko originates with the Hausas of West Africa. It is a millet porridge, brownish in color, spiced with ginger (I think there are some variations on this). I add nkateɛ ("groundnuts," Americans say peanuts) and sugar (Ghanaian customers sometimes skip the sugar). I might be slightly off, but if I recall correctly, a bowl of koko was about 50 Ghana pesawas (less than 50 US cents) and then sometime 2007 it went up to 70 Ghana pesawas. I would often complement the millet porridge with one or two kose (Hausa, "bean cakes").

Rice and Milk

During one of several visits to Klikor, a Ewe village in the Volta Region of eastern Ghana, (roughly a 20 minute ride from the Togo border) a "small girl" served me what I assumed would be koko. But when I looked down at the bowl I was surprised to see something different but familiar--a rice and milk porridge--Ghanaians call it "rice water."[1]

This meal brought back memories and raised a few questions.

Rice and Milk

When I was a youngin' my mom would occasionally serve us rice and milk porridge--we added butter and sugar. In fact the porridge before me tasted nearly identical to my mom's porridge. So I got to wonderin' how this dish arrived in Ghana. 

 Was it an independent invention or was it introduced during colonialism or some other period? Was "rice water" an African meal that our enslaved Ancestors reproduced during slavery? 

Turns out that the latter query is not likely. Rice farming was introduced to European colonialist in North America by enslaved African women from the Grain Coast.[2] However, New World dairy consumption was apparently introduced by Europeans. [3]

Afro-Jewish America

My (adopted) mother was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. She wondered if the porridge might be of Jewish-American origin. She was raised by her grandmother who was half Jewish and half African American. Back in her grandmother's day, poor Jews and African Americans worked side-by-side in coalmine camps. It was not uncommon for Jewish women to have relationships with African American men in the camps. 

What I found really interesting about my mom's story is that she says her grandmother served rice in one of two ways: a porridge or they added eggs to make rice pudding ("we would add raisins for a treat"). (I checked online and found lots of references to German Jewish cuisine and rice puddings). She says she was not exposed to African American Soul Food until she was an adult and recalls being taken aback upon discovering that black folks ate rice for lunch and dinner with gravy. 

The Strange Career of Rice and Milk Porridge

So there you have it. I initially thought I had uncovered another Africanism, but it turned out that my familiarity with the dish was actually owed to Jewish America. And the movement of the porridge seems to go in many different directions. I have read or have been told of versions in Spain, Latin America [4], Nigeria and Haiti. And I have had the Indian version many times. My guess is that it was diffused to some areas but independently invented in other areas. But it doesn't seem to have been a popular meal in the Black South. I am hoping to hear from some readers to clarify this. 

Notes

[1] Fran Osseo-Asare has a recipe for rice-water on her Africa cuisine blog. Ghanaians apparently use more water than my mom does but I could not tell the difference.

[2] The Grain (or Rice) Coast spanned much of what was known as the Upper Guinea Coast. It stretched from Senegambia to Sierra Leone. Rice farmers in this region were typically women. 

[3] There is more to this story. Joseph Harris, in his book Africanisms in American Culture (p. 40) notes that Africans have not been acknowledged for their contributions to the North American dairy industry.

[4] In South America the porridge is called arroz con leche ("rice with milk").  

tags: food, jews, african american, latin america

See also: War on Fake Jollof Rice