Tebu (Toubou)

La Boule

also Aiysh

Millet or sorghum porridge shaped into a ball and served with sauce, the daily food of most of Chad. Eaten by hand from a shared bowl by the whole household.

Serves 6 · 40 minutes

Sauce Longue

also Okra sauce, Sauce gluante

Dried okra powder cooked into a deliberately viscous sauce with meat and sesame, ladled over boule. The stringiness is the point and the mark of a good one.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 20 minutes

Daraba

Okra, sweet potato, aubergine and greens stewed with groundnut paste into a thick vegetable sauce, served over la boule. Chad's national dish and almost always meatless.

Serves 6 · 1 hour

Nachif

also Minced beef with spices

Beef minced or finely chopped and fried hard with onion, tomato and spice until dry and crisp at the edges, served with boule or bread across Chad.

Serves 6 · 50 minutes

Kissar

Thin fermented sorghum flatbread spread on a hot plate, the same as Sudanese kisra and eaten across eastern Chad with stew.

Serves Makes 12 · 30 minutes, plus 2 days fermenting

Mouton Grillé

Whole mutton grilled over embers for Eid and for guests, seasoned with nothing more than salt and cumin. The animal itself is the statement.

Serves 10 · 3 hours 30 minutes

Karkanji

also Spiced hibiscus drink

Hibiscus steeped with ginger, cloves and mint, the Chadian festival and Ramadan drink, sweeter and more heavily spiced than the Sudanese karkade.

Serves Makes 2 litres · 30 minutes, plus 3 hours steeping

Poisson Salanga

Fish from the Chari or Lake Chad, split, salted, sun-dried and then grilled, from the Sara country of the south. The smell of the drying racks carries for a long way.

Serves 4 · 40 minutes, plus 2 days drying

Poisson Séché en Sauce

also Dried fish stew, Salanga en sauce

The Chari's sun-dried fish rehydrated and stewed with tomato, onion and dried okra, the everyday protein of the Chadian river country.

Serves 6 · 50 minutes

Bili Bili

Millet beer brewed and sold by women from courtyards in southern Chad, drunk warm and cloudy from a calabash. A marked pot outside means today's batch is ready.

Serves Makes about 5 litres · 4 days

Bouillie de Mil

also Millet porridge, Bouillie

Millet porridge soured overnight and thinned with milk or tamarind, drunk in the morning and at the breaking of the fast across the Chadian sahel.

Serves 6 · 30 minutes, plus overnight souring

Bazin

A firm dome of barley dough boiled in the broth it is served with, eaten by hand from a communal dish. The dough is beaten with a stick called a magraf until it is stiff enough to hold its shape.

Serves 6 · 2 hours

Shorba Libiya

Lamb soup with orzo, mint and a great deal of tomato, eaten daily through Ramadan and at almost every Libyan table besides. The dried mint stirred in at the end is not optional.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes

Mbekbka

also Libyan pasta soup

Broken pasta cooked in a spiced tomato and lamb broth until it absorbs everything, the Libyan weekday dinner and a dish of the whole Tripolitanian coast.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes

Mbatten

Potato slices sandwiched around spiced minced meat, battered and deep fried. Sold from Ramadan stalls in Tripoli and Benghazi and made at home in quantities that never seem to be enough.

Serves Makes 12 · 45 minutes

Couscous bil Osban

Couscous served with osban, a sausage of offal, rice, herbs and spices packed into tripe. Made for Eid from the sacrificed animal, and the dish Libyans abroad miss most.

Serves 8 · 3 hours

Ghraiba

also Chickpea flour biscuits

Crumbling biscuits of roasted chickpea flour and butter, made for Eid across Libya and gone within a day.

Serves Makes about 40 · 1 hour

Rishda

Hand-cut noodles steamed and served with a chickpea and onion sauce, from Tripolitania. A quiet, unspiced dish in a cuisine that is otherwise emphatic, and usually eaten in winter.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes

Asida bil Rub

A soft wheat pudding served in a pool of date syrup and olive oil, eaten for the Prophet's birthday and to celebrate a birth. Sweet, plain and eaten from the shared dish with the fingers.

Serves 6 · 30 minutes

Tuwon Masara

Stiff maize or millet porridge served with a sauce of baobab leaf or okra, the daily meal in most of Niger. Eaten hot from a shared calabash.

Serves 6 · 40 minutes

Dambou

Steamed couscous of millet or maize tossed with moringa leaves, oil and onion. Niger's signature dish, eaten at weddings and named as the national plate.

Serves 6 · 1 hour

Kilishi

Beef sliced paper thin, dried in the sun, coated in a groundnut and spice paste and dried again. It keeps for months and is the traveller's meat of the Sahel.

Serves Makes 500g · 3 days

Masa

also Waina, Rice cakes

Small fermented rice cakes fried in a dimpled pan until crisp at the edges and soft in the middle, sold at Nigerien markets with a peppery sauce or with sugar.

Serves Makes about 24 · 40 minutes, plus overnight fermenting

Fari Masa

Light fried rice-flour puffs eaten at breakfast and at Eid, hollow inside and dusted with sugar or dipped in pepper sauce depending on the household.

Serves Makes 20 · 3 hours

Sauce Kopto

A Zarma sauce of moringa or jute leaves with soumbala and dried fish, poured over tuwo. Green, salty and deeply savoury from the fermented locust bean.

Serves 6 · 45 minutes

Fura da Nono

Balls of spiced millet dough crumbled into fermented cow's milk, a Fulani drink and meal in one. Sold by women carrying calabashes on their heads.

Serves 4 · 45 minutes