Angola and Mozambique

Angola and Mozambique though not adjacent and geographically very different, were both once Portuguese colonies and their cooking was influenced thereby and also by the trade between them. Laurens van der Post (1977), describing the ‘two wings’ of cooking in Africa which the Portuguese created and which were held together by their presence, puts it well:

Roughly, one is South American, or more specifically Brazilian, and is most evident in Angola. The other is a compound effect, in Mozambique, of the Portuguese experiences of the East from its Arabian outposts in Zanzibar to the coast of Malabar in India and Malacca on to the Celestial Empire. Since there was a constant coming and going between Angola and Mozambique from the earliest days, these two schools naturally borrowed freely from one another. Yet it is surprising that they retain nuances of their own. Rice, spice and the fruits of the Orient feature more prominently in Mozambique than they do in Angola.