Fufu is boiled green plantains and cassava, pounded in a wooden mortar to a distinct pum-pum-pum beat. Fufu, the way I like it, comes out a warm yellow, with specks of black from the plantain seeds. But fufu on its own is bland. Fufu is both food and utensil, and strong enough to scoop up soup. Ghanaians eat it with palm soup, groundnut soup, a tomato soup called light soup or ebunuebunu, green soup. Adventurous eaters go for a combination of all four, known as nkatenkontobenkwan. But I am a purist. Ebunuebunu is my favorite.

Fufu originated among the Akan, the ethnic group that includes the Ashanti, Akwapim and Fanti people of what is today southern Ghana and Ivory Coast. It journeyed across West Africa as foofoo, foufou or foutou, and sailed across the Atlantic in the hearts of the people who were uprooted and enslaved, even keeping its name in Cuba. Of ebunuebunu, however, I am hard pressed to find derivatives. Its ingredients are the leaf of the cocoyam plant; dried mudfish, tilapia or other river fish; mushrooms; snails; onions; ginger; garlic; and sometimes grasscutter, the cane rat, which my mother says “adds gamy flavor for those who like it.” The ingredients are slow-cooked until they coalesce into a forest-green broth that looks like witches’ brew and tastes like smoke and earth, with a wholesomeness that lingers on the tongue.

For many Africans, recipes are one of the last vestiges of connection between our presents and pasts, before the culture-changing influences of Islam, Christianity and colonialism. What we thought was African print fabric turns out to be imported from Indonesia via the Netherlands. Our religions, our languages, are now mishmashes of what was and what infiltrated.

Even with food, pure ancestral links can be tenuous. In Ghana, for instance, there are two types of cocoyam. One was native to the forests of the Ashanti, and the other was introduced from the Americas, possibly in the 16th or 17th century, or much later, in the 1800s, by West Indian missionaries. The native type is called old cocoyam and the other, new cocoyam.