By Ozoz Sokoh
Being away from home often leads to adaptations of methods and ingredients when translating, and recreating recipes. In this transnational game of “telephone,” a fair amount may be lost, especially where regional recipes have gone national. In Culinary heritage in Asia: National and regional identities, Reflections from the field, Stephanie Assmann suggests that safeguarding regional food products may consist of maintaining a “collective memory” of food as a positive self-identification and reaffirming diasporic group identity.
In geographies where cultural documentation is nascent, preservation of recipes and food products may be barely-constructed. Take the case of Nigerian suya, a popular street food composed of seasoned, grilled skewers of meat. While suya’s heritage is in the north of Nigeria where it is made by Hausa men, mallams, it has spread across the country via pastoral nomads. Today, suya is considered a national treasure, and every locale boasts a suya spot.
For a long time, associated regional practices were not well-known and documented outside the north, creating a significant gap between regional and national food knowledge. Today, food blogs and other social sharing have changed that, facilitating knowledge exchange.
To make suya, meat skewers are seasoned with basic yaji, and served with yajin kuli, also called suya spice. Both spice blends, from the “yaji family” often contain indigenous spices — grains of Selim, calabash nutmeg; and globally available ones — ginger, garlic, salt, and cloves. Basic yaji is nutless, and yajin kuli is made with kulikuli, a defatted groundnut (peanut) biscuit, made with leftover dough from groundnut oil processing. Often salted, the dough is sometimes seasoned with warming spices, and sweetened with sugar before being fashioned into shapes including rings and crackers, then deep-fried to create products that are shelf-stable. Kulikuli gets ground down and added to basic yaji for the nutty yajin kuli served alongside suya.
For decades, many Nigerians bought suya with nary an attempt to make it at home. Public know-how was largely limited to observations at the suya spot during purchase, usually in the evening. What we saw: sticks of already-grilled meat would be pulled from a pile based on your selection, reheated on the grill, placed on paper where they would be cut from the sticks into bitesized pieces.
Toppings followed on that foundation: one or more of cut tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, cucumber, cabbage. Each wrap was finished with a sprinkling of yajin kuli and parcelled to-go, with extra packets — paper or foil — of yajin kuli. At home, the packets were employed in a host of things, including making suya and instant noodles, erroneously leading to assumptions that suya was only seasoned with yajin kuli because we didn’t see the first step when seasoning where prepared raw-meat-on-sticks were dredged in nutless, basic yaji.
So, my translation of suya recipes and substitutions began incorrectly long before I moved away from home.
In 2007, I was married and parenting two, soon-to-be three young children, when we moved to The Netherlands. We longed for suya so I began to make my own, first with yajin kuli that we requested from visiting family members and then in 2010, with a peanut butter sauce I reverse-engineered based on taste memories and yajin kuli “knowledge”.
I shared a recipe on my Kitchen Butterfly blog, one of the earliest Nigerian food blogs, and on Food52 where it won a Suya Swordfish recipe contest. Both features cemented the use of groundnuts (peanuts) when making suya spice, and erroneously presented my partial knowledge as whole.
When I moved back to Nigeria in 2011, homemade suya was common. My older sister, Upe, introduced me to Bamanga, a mallam who made delicious suya for her and so I ordered some yaji from him. I was confused when I received two blends (for cooking, and serving) since I only knew one. My bamangafied suya was tastier than I’d ever had but I still didn’t understand the difference.
It wasn’t until 2024, while recipe-testing for my award-winning debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria, that I learned more from my friend Hauwa who is from the north. Hauwa shared that yajin kuli burned easily on the grill, sticking to the grates. She shared that it was best as an accompaniment to suya, and prepared fresh otherwise it turned “cold”, a reference to the kulikuli softening, and turning rancid.
Today, there is an abundance of suya recipes online and in print, and you no longer have to depend on your mallam for suya spice – you can find it online and in physical stores. The majority of recipes, digital and in books, continue to feature variations on the groundnut/ peanut butter theme.
When a recipe becomes national, and media channels make information accessible, due diligence is required to capture the origin story and translate that to knowledge. I’ve learned the difference — thank you, Hauwa — and corrected my words. Now when I encounter recipes, I apply the 5Ws and 1H journalism framework, asking “What are the ingredients?”, “How is it made?”, and other questions around Who, Where, When, and Why, questions that fully illuminate the nuance of construction. We miss a lot when we adopt recipes, but are only versed in their consumption — care in translating the heritage processes is how we safeguard and preserve legacy.
Ozoz Sokoh is an ex-exploration geologist, food and tourism studies educator, 2026 James Beard Emerging Voice in Book, and Nautilus Gold Awardee for her book, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria (2025), the definitive guide to Nigerian cuisine drawn from over a decade of unearthing and preserving Nigerian culinary tradition. She researches, and interrogates connected foodways across the world, highlighting similarities between popular, little known cultures and cuisines.
Her ongoing project, “Coast to Coast: From West Africa to the World” traces the histories and edible trails of West Africa and its diaspora through ingredients and “commodities” and is documented on Feast Afrique. It includes an open-access digital library of 250+ Black culinary resources, from the 1800s to date, a hall of fame, data-driven work on the role of food media in marginalizing West African voices, and a series of short films available for screening.
She makes her home on Land of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in Ontario, Canada. Ozoz has spoken at TEDx and at conferences hosted by the Culinary Institute of America. Her work has been featured in Brittle Paper, The Republic, Smithsonian Magazine, Gastro Obscura, CNN African Voices, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and more.
