What to Buy at an African Market in Boston

People walk into our shop on Washington Street, stand in front of the shelves for a minute, and then ask some version of the same question: where do I even start?

It is a fair question. An African market is not organized the way a chain supermarket is. The aisles are not sorted by meal. They are sorted by the way people actually cook, which means the starch is in one place, the stew base is in another, and the thing that makes the whole dish taste like something is in a jar you have to know to look for.

What follows is not a shopping list, because what is on the shelf changes with what comes in. It is closer to a way of reading the room.

Start with the starch, because the starch decides the meal

In a lot of West and Central African cooking, the starch is not a side. It is the vehicle. The stew is the flavor and the starch is how you eat it, usually with your hands, usually torn and dipped.

That means the first decision you make in the shop is which starch you are cooking around. Fufu is the one most people have heard of, and it is less a single ingredient than a category: cassava, plantain, yam, or a blend, sold as a flour you cook down into a smooth, stretchy mound. Garri is cassava again, but grated and dried, and it behaves completely differently. You can soak it cold with sugar and peanuts and eat it as it comes, or cook it into eba.

If you have cooked none of this before, buy the smallest bag of one of them and cook it twice. The second attempt is always better than the first, because the first one teaches you how much water you actually needed.

The stew base is where the money goes

Most of what people think of as African food is a stew, and most of those stews are built on a base that is some combination of tomato, onion, pepper, and oil. What changes is the thickener and the fat.

Egusi, ground melon seed, thickens a stew and gives it a nutty weight that nothing else does. Palm oil carries a color and a flavor that neutral oils cannot fake, and a little goes a long way. Groundnut, which is to say peanut, turns into a stew base that runs from West Africa through to the soups people know as maafe.

Buy one of these, not all three. A stew base is a commitment, and the jar you bought because it looked interesting will still be full in a year.

Spice blends are the shortcut, and they are not cheating

Berbere is the Ethiopian and Eritrean blend built on chilli, fenugreek, and a long list of warm spices. It is the backbone of doro wat and it will improve almost any braise you put it in. Harissa comes from the other end of the Continent, North African, chilli and garlic and caraway, usually as a paste. Suya spice, from Nigeria, is peanut-forward and built for grilled meat.

These blends are the fastest way into the food. A whole cuisine’s worth of balancing has already been done for you by someone who knew what they were doing. Start with one, use it on something you already cook well, and you will learn more about it in a week than you would from reading about it.

We also carry blends from people making them here. A.L.L. Seasonings, made locally, leans Caribbean rather than continental, low-sodium and built for everyday cooking. Hapi African Gourmet makes sauces, spices, and frozen prepared meals, and the frozen side is worth knowing about on a night when you are not cooking from scratch.

The meat counter is a different conversation

Our butchery is halal, and the meat comes from regional farms we buy from directly. Beef, lamb, goat, and chicken.

Goat is the one worth talking about, because it is the cut most people in Boston have never bought and it is central to an enormous amount of cooking across Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. It is lean, it wants time, and it rewards a long braise in a way that beef does not. If you have had goat curry or goat pepper soup and thought you could not make it at home, you can. Ask at the counter about having it cut for stew.

Oxtail is the other one worth asking about. It takes hours and it is not cheap, but it breaks down into something no quick cut will give you.

One practical note. On Sundays the butcher counter is case-ready only, so we cannot do custom cuts. If you need something broken down a particular way, come Monday through Saturday.

Ask the person behind the counter

If you are holding a bag of something and have no idea what to do with it, ask. An answer from someone standing in front of the shelf accounts for what actually came in that week, which is more than a recipe found online can do.

It is a normal question in a shop like this, and a better outcome than buying the wrong thing and giving up on it.

Where we are

Nubian Markets is at 2565 Washington Street in Roxbury, in Nubian Square. Two thousand square feet of grocery, a halal butcher counter, and a kitchen.

We are open Monday to Friday from 7am to 8pm and Saturday from 8am to 8pm. On Sunday the grocery is open from 9am to 6pm, with the cafe closed and the butcher counter case-ready only.

Come in without a list the first time. Walk the aisles, pick up the things you do not recognize, and ask. That is how most people who shop here regularly started.