A Spicy Spinach Stew From Ghana

I thought I would talk with Samuel Obeng about the smoky spinach stew the chefs serve at his Bronx restaurant, Papaye, but he steered the conversation toward weightier matters. “I want to set up an African cultural center here in the Bronx,” he told me. “In Manhattan, they have a museum about sex! So why can’t I have an African museum? We can teach our kids how people back in Ghana dress, how they talk. We can teach our kids how to drum.”

Obeng, who is 49, came to New York 22 years ago, settling, like most of the city’s 27,000 Ghanaians, within bunting distance of Yankee Stadium. A serial entrepreneur, he filled the conversation with the words “innovation” and “efficiency,” intoning them like blessings. With the authority of someone who has already made it, he noted the need for his community to commit itself to its American present, not its Ghanaian past. And yet he has a preservationist’s instinct. There is his dream of a museum, of course, as well as the restaurant that he bought for the ways it connects him, and his friends, to Africa.

The day I visited Papaye, the call of the homeland was on display. A TV glowed green with a soccer pitch — Ghana versus Senegal in the Africa Cup of Nations — and before the place was even open, Ghanaians stood outside peering in, waiting for the greatest-hits collection of dishes that they miss: starchy mashes called fufu; peanut-butter soups with rice balls; the spicy, smoky spinach stew, thickened with ground pumpkin seeds, so obsession-inducing that I eventually ended up with three versions of it in my fridge. By midday, the place had the intimacy of your favorite uncle’s rec room, only for the whole neighborhood. Customers slurped funky soups, nodding along to the talk and the music, its chewy rhythms bouncing around the small dining room.

“Music is very important to Ghanaians!” Obeng said. “I want to have a band at the restaurant, so people really experience the culture.” He imagined it as an attraction to draw customers (“I’ve had white people eating here, from Brooklyn!”), but just as much, it seemed, as a means to help hold onto his Ghanaian past.

I was brought to Papaye by Charles Cann, 34, who came to the United States 14 years ago for college, after his dream of going to the University of Ghana was deferred because of a teachers’ strike. Raised on a farm by an aunt who worked as a caterer, he has been a cook since childhood and occasionally holds classes around the city. Before teaching me to make that spinach stew, he wanted me to taste how it might be made back in Ghana’s capital, Accra. He also wanted to show me some Ghanaian markets — stores full of salty, smoky smells and stacks of imported yams the size of bowling pins. At three for $25, the yams are too expensive for a food you eat like a potato, so Cann doesn’t buy them. He misses their taste, but it’s O.K. He returns to Ghana regularly, hoping that his work here as a sound engineer will allow him to move back someday to make television shows for children. And after he visits Accra, he brings back his spices, the truest flavors of home.

But he’s happy to let the dishes evolve in his New York kitchen. For his version of the spinach stew, he melted palm oil on the stove and slowly fried onions and ginger in its wild shock of red. Adding chiles, he said, “We call the habanero ‘ojenma’; it means, ‘It smells well,’ ” and the pepper’s fruit sang above the heavy, buttery sweetness steaming out of the pot. Later, there was the mellowing tang of tomatoes and a profound aroma from smoked shrimp powder, a West African flavor staple that tastes as if you somehow barbecued fish sauce. He added piles of spinach and enough ground melon seeds, called egusi, to make the whole thing look more like a scramble than a stew. I asked about substitutions — pumpkin seeds, smoked paprika, fish sauce. “You can kind of make it however you want it,” Cann reassured me.

Smoky, spicy, savory and rich, the dish was delicious, and I scribbled down the recipe. But recipes need a title, and it turned out that no one knew what to call this. To Cann, a mix of greens, a gingery tomato base and egusi are what defines “palaver sauce.” But when I told Obeng that I loved the palaver sauce at Papaye, he exclaimed, intensely, that I had eaten no such thing. The palaver sauce he knows is always made with meat or smoked fish; greens without flesh are kontomire stew, and I realized I’d trampled on the rules by calling one the other — the rules you have to keep if you are trying to protect a culture an ocean away from its home.

Source: Nytimes.com

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