Ghana to the World

Introduction

One of the questions I get asked the most by people I’m meeting for the first time is “How’d you get into this?” It could be at a food event, or in an interview, or just in casual conversation. They want to know about my path to becoming a chef and how I knew I wanted to pursue this career. Looking back, becoming a chef feels like it was destined—a logical gathering of many threads in my story.

Food has always been at the center of my life, helping me understand myself and my place in the world. There were comforting West African stews in my childhood house in Yonkers, New York; the classical French dishes from my time in culinary school in Providence, Rhode Island; those golden-brown bofrot I ate outside of my grandparents’ house in Kumasi, Ghana—each experience holds an important place informing my love of food and how I see my love of food, my perspective, and the act of cooking.

From a young age, seeing my mother cook and watching chefs on TV showed me that I could use this skill and change a bunch of ingredients into a dish that could evoke emotion in whoever was eating it. The process used to cook humble ingredients could not only morph those products into anything, it could also make a viewer or someone nearby feel something. That intrigued me and fascinated me. It still does. I had some support: my guidance counselor in high school pointed me toward culinary arts as a way to embrace my love of science and also as a way to show my personality. And my mom encouraged me to go to school for it. I didn’t know it then, but cooking would become my outlet for showing instead of telling others about my background, my family, and how I see the world.

I’ve been thinking about telling this story for a long time. About how being a first-generation Ghanaian American shapes how I see things, and how my story is similar to many immigrant family stories yet also unique because of my place in the world and the time that I’m alive. The foods that I eat and encounter as I travel help me draw connections and see the differences between cultures. Being both West African and American ties me to the continent, to America, and to the generationslong story of people with similar skin tones to mine whose ancestors made the journey so many hundreds of years ago.

I’ve used food to talk about these connections in restaurants and on television, but writing it out, looking at it as one cohesive story and as a picture that’s still being painted, has required me to look both forward and backward in time in order to understand how I got here and where I want to go. It was clear to me that there was a fluidity between these past and present moments. So over the course of writing this book, one thing became clear: my story is sankofa, a Ghanaian adinkra symbol depicted by an image of a backward-facing bird flying forward, carrying an egg in its mouth. Whether you’re in Accra, Kumasi, or on the coast, you’ll see it in paintings on street corners or as metal artwork—it’s omnipresent as a guiding principle. Adinkra symbols—simple line drawings that create a set of West African iconography—tell stories and represent core life lessons. In Twi, sankofa reads as “Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki,” which translates to “It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.”

The sankofa symbol has become a foundational belief and mission for many African Americans and Black chefs, telling us that sometimes, in order to move forward, we have to look backward. For me, it’s a beautiful, prescient reminder that we must understand where we came from to see who we are and where we need to go. A life of traveling back and forth between America and Ghana has shown me how much each place informs my work as a chef and my identity. Much like sankofa, I work to carry the gift of calling both West Africa and America home into all that I do.

This book is a reflection of the journey I undertook to understand the many parts of my identity and the wisdom that those places, tastes, and memories hold for me. Writing these recipes and this story has enabled me to express and celebrate my life through food while also looking at the trials I’ve faced and the triumphs I’ve achieved. But, as with anything, I can create only through my own lens, showing my point of view. Interpretation is tricky, since it requires seeing the inspiration and staying true to it while adding elements that enhance without masking the brilliance of the original. I don’t represent all Ghanaians or Ghanaian Americans, just me, and I’m working with classic dishes and different techniques to make food that represents me and my perspective. The recipes here are dishes you can enjoy, but they’re also stories about how I got creative with the food I grew up with and incorporated things I’ve seen, learned, and tasted throughout my journey, balancing the traditional and the modern, making dishes that are true to their essence while also reflecting my own story as a Ghanaian American.

Cooking is a creative, occasionally frustrating, and rewarding practice that helps me express myself. It allows me to not only transport myself to different places, but take people along, bringing them into my world and how I see things. That means a lot to me—to be able to help someone experience a little bit of what life is like outside of their purview feels like a superpower. It’s my favorite part of being a chef.

I wrote this book to push the boundaries of what many people think Africa is and isn’t. I feel a responsibility as a chef to bring tradition and culture to my cooking but also to think about the lineage of West African cooking, to create a cohesive message of how impactful Africa as a continent and West Africa as a region are to food culture globally. And that by looking to the continent we can look at the past and the future. This book continues that legacy. What’s exciting is that it’s only the beginning. I’m still evolving and understanding the world. Even though I have a very strong sense of who I am, the world around me is still moving and changing, and I continue to grow. You’ll see how my path to becoming a chef unfolded and how by looking back, I was able to move forward, and I hope you see how sankofa can be applied to your life too.