Recipes
Tim and Laura Beth’s Kenya Page
This site provides 10 recipes, with
some comments to place the recipes in context. For example, we
learn that Ugali is the national dish
Very few of the recipes depend on
native ingredients.
www.blissites.com
Select Culture, then Recipes
Upenn.edu
Five recipes are provided, plus
Kenyan Tea and Kilimanjaro Coffee.
Learn that there are two types of
Kenyan cuisine, one based on Ugali, the other on Irio.
The site contains instructions for
serving an authentic Kenyan meal. As hostess, greet your guests
in a bright, floor-length skirt and a striking bandana. Serve
food in a decorated calabash, an African bowl.
www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Cookbook/Kenya.html
Webguest.com
A portal for sites with Kenyan
recipes is provided at:
directory.webguest.com/index.cgi/Home/Cooking/World_Cuisines/African.
Select Kenyan
AfricaOnline.com
This corporate site supplies 13
recipes. Nearly all have a sentence placing the recipe in
context. Many ingredients are native, such as tender green
maize, green corn cobs, plantain bananas, dried fish (ohema). It
would be helpful if substitutes were provided.
www.africaonline.com/site/ke
(This site has undergone a restructuring. It is not clear that
it has retained the Kenya recipes.)
Kenya, the Country
Tim and Laura Beth’s Kenya Page
www.blissites.com
Tim and Laura (see recipes above)
provide an excellent orientation to all things Kenyan.
Their history section explains the lack
of Portugese influence on Kenyan cooking. While the Portugese
were present for 200 hundred years, beginning in 1498, in that
time:
". . . the
Portuguese showed no interest in colonization. The chief concern
of the handful of Portuguese in the coastal towns was trade, and
the two centuries of their presence left no permanent marks
other than a few words bequeathed to the Swahili language and
such monuments as Fort Jesus. Indirectly, however, as elsewhere
in East Africa, Portuguese influence had a far-reaching impact
through the introduction of major food crops from the New World,
in particular, maize, cassava, and potatoes. These became
staples in much of the region and contributed to the growth of
its population."
Quoted from Countries of the World,
Kenya by Robert Rhinehart, 1991
ApproTec
This is a group of Americans
working in Kenya creating basic devices, such as hand-driven
water pumps and oil-seed presses, used by native entrepreneurs
to advance the primitive economy.
They learned that most foreign aid goes
to the very poorest people. Like street people in our cities,
they can do nothing with the aid but consume it. Conventional
aid bypasses those who are poor but not destitute and who are
capable of entrepreneurial activity.
The ApproTec story is compelling. It is
a heartening contrast to the history of conventional aid, which
goes on and on and does little or nothing to make any real
change in primitive economies.
Kenyans have made 24,000 of the
ApproTec pumps, which use only hand power. $33 million in new
businesses has been created.
For a case history, showing just how
the hand pump has impacted a small farmer and the local economy,
consider Mrs. Ondiek's story.
www.approtec.org
