Nigerian Yam Porridge

Oscar Mokeme is an emphatic guy who's passionate about African art, culture, and healing. I think I'll be going back to The Museum of African Culture which houses much of his life-long collection, for more doses of African comfort foods, interesting perspectives on life in the world, and healing. By a conversation around a certain mask, he disolved my rage at a mysterious serial litterer in my neighborhood. It was quite incredible. Click at right for the full story, how-to photos, and recipes.

Photo: Greta Rybus

The Recipe - Nigerian Yam Porridge

As Oscar Mokeme from Oba, Nigeria, taught Lindsay Sterling in Bath, ME, December 2012


Serves 8
Cooking time: 45 min

3 pounds Nigerian yams
1/2 cup crayfish powder
1 large yellow onion minced
1 tsp ground dried chili peppers
1 can tomato paste
1/2 cup smoked fish (optional) similar to chilean sea bass
drizzle herb-infused olive oil
1 red pepper, diced
salt to taste
1 clove garlic
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 tsp dried thyme
whole shrimp (optional)
1 can corned beef


Peel yams with a knife. Cover with 1 inch of water in a wide, deep saute pan. Boil gently for ten minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients through the thyme. Let cook until yam pieces yield to a knife blade easily through their centers. Then add whole shrimp if you like, and/or canned corned beef to thicken the sauce.

See How To Do It

Nigerian Yam Porridge, Egusi Soup, and Brown Rice Foufou

Photos by Greta Rybus. You have to check out her blog, Who I Met, with beautiful photos and interviews with wildly interesting everyday people. I simply love it.

This is actually a yam from the Carribean. There are over 150 varieties of yams through out the world, and those are unrelated what Americans call yams! This tasted similar to Nigerian yams, he said, only there was a little bitterness that he didn't recognize.

Interesting. He couldn't find the right kind of smoked fish here for the yam porridge. He found that canned corned beef had a similar effect! Unbelievable! I was scared of it, but was surprised how good it was. He likes how it thickens the sauce slightly.

 Onions and peppers go into the yam porridge. I'd call it beef stew, really, but he insisted on yam porridge! Ooo. This is his secret chili pepper blend, made up of 15 kinds of chili peppers he finds at the marget in Nigeria. Super hot to taste directly, but the beef stew didn't end up what I would call "spicy" at all.

Oscar Mokeme's family gives him grief for cooking. Men don't usually cook in Nigeria!

Here is the yam porridge. Though the crayfish powder added a sea-foody twist that was brand new to me, the concept was beef stew at it's heart. The yams were a lot like potatoes in flavor, only waxier.

Now he is going to prepare the egusi soup, which wasn't actually soup by my definition, more of a cooked vegetable mash, but again, he insisted, the name is egusi soup! And sure enough, online there were a bunch of postings and videos with other Nigerian versions of the recipe. So cool.

 These are ground egusi mellon seeds. The mellon looks a lot like a watermelon on the outside, with differently shaped leaves on the vine. The melon seeds thicken and curdle in hot broth, to look something like cottage cheese. Cool.

Here you have broth just heating up with the egusi powder, palm oil (to make it red), and red onion. Next he will add kale.

 Then bring it all up to a boil and the egusi powder thickens up and sucks up all the broth.

Here it is! You eat this by breaking off pieces of the fou fou (next pic) and scooping up the egusi "soup" with it.

Please contact Greta Rybus for photo permissions. 

The Story

Nigerian Yam Power

By Lindsay Sterling

I was thrilled recently when the director of The Museum of African Culture (13 Brown Street, Portland, ME 04101, africart@museumafricanculture.org 207-871-7188) offered to add another country to Immigrant Kitchen’s culinary world tour. Last week he taught me how to make his favorite foods from Nigeria and gave me a guided tour of the museum. His name is Oscar Mokeme. He is a 52-year-old father, grandfather, art collector, and traditional West African healer.

Oscar’s relatives mail him the specific ingredients he needs from Nigeria. As for how I would get them, he said, “The only way to get a good authentic yam is to go to Boston,” specifically, Tropical Foods Supermarket (2101 Washington St. Boston, MA 02119) in Roxbury. Nigerian yams, unrelated to what we call yams in America, range in size from a ping pong ball to a large sweet potato. They are not sweet. Oscar says yams are so important to Nigerian culture, people have yam banks like we have banks for money. I will also need to find at the market: crayfish powder, the seeds of the egusi melon, and palm oil, a red oil produced from the fruit of a type of palm tree.

Oscar peeled 3 pounds of yams with a knife and cooked large chunks covered in water in a deep pan. He added one diced yellow onion, tomato paste, rosemary, thyme, and a cup of crayfish powder. Then when the yams were soft but not falling apart, he opened up a can of corned beef and mixed that into the red broth. He couldn’t find the right smoked fish here, and he found that canned corned beef created the right texture. Once this was all hot, he called it, “yam porridge.” I’ll admit, the canned corned beef scared me. The crayfish powder, too. But yam porridge looked and actually tasted a lot like beef stew with potatoes, the crayfish powder adding a slight twist.

Oscar showed me some photos of his home in Nigeria. I was surprised. It looked like San Francisco with skyscrapers, cars, motorcycles and highways. But it also is a place of culture rooted over 7500 years ago. He demonstrated one traditional healing practice that he would use to cure a migraine. It involved him facing the migraine sufferer, finding the source of the migraine, and then channeling the migraine into an egg, which the migraine sufferer and the healer held between them. Then the egg, containing the source of the migraines, would be discarded.

He used the egusi melon seeds, ground up, to thicken a different meat and seafood broth into a cottage cheese like substance. To that he added chopped onions, chopped kale, and palm oil. He called this “egusi soup” and served it with his favorite kind of foufou, which looks like mashed potatoes but was made of brown rice flour cooked with water.

At the Museum, I came face to face with stylized boobs, bellies and phalluses, beaded wall hangings, ceremonial regalia, and statues. I found the exhibit shocking and exhilarating. I highly recommend asking Oscar to guide you through it. The Museum is open Tuesday-Saturday 11-4pm. Admission $5. Also, the museum is hosting a series of pop-up Haitian dinners, $50 (Dec. 13, 27; Jan 10,24; Feb 7, 28; March 7,28) as part of its Haitian Voodoo exhibit. Oscar performs healing by consultation Tuesdays and Thursdays at the museum. Call for an appointment. Lastly, drop by for drumming and music this January First Friday Art Walk.