Fufu

Fufu is a thick, dough-like pounded food eaten across West Africa, traditionally made by boiling starchy staples such as cassava, plantain, cocoyam or yam and then pounding them together in a wooden mortar with a pestle, adding water gradually until the mixture becomes soft and elastic. The word comes from Twi, the language of the Akan people of Ghana, and before cassava reached West Africa with Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, fufu was made mainly from yam, plantain and cocoyam. It is eaten across Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other West and Central African countries, and modern versions are sometimes made more quickly from cassava flour, wheat semolina or maize flour rather than by hand pounding. Fufu is traditionally served in a ball that diners tear off by hand and dip into a soup or stew, and it remains a daily staple food across the region, having also traveled with West African diaspora communities to the Caribbean, where related dishes are eaten in Cuba, Haiti and Puerto Rico.