African American Food: To The Civil War: African Kitchen

Some of the foods available to the West African kitchen of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries are listed below. Some were indigenous to West Africa, such as okra, tamarind, ackee, watermelon, the Bambara groundnut, and some species of rice, millet, yams, cowpeas (black-eyed peas), sesame seeds, and sorghum. During the period from 1450 to 1650, referred to by some historians as the Age of Expansion or the Age of Discovery, European explorers introduced Asian bananas, cowpeas, and rices and American cassavas, maize, squashes, sweet potatoes, and peanuts into the region. Not all of these foods were available to any one tribe, although all were to be found throughout the West African region at this time in history.