BBC Learnings · Section 2

Preserving traditional recipes

Now, all over the world people love to eat and most of us have favourite food we like to cook. Often this involves a recipe

Level: B2 · 84 sentences

Transcript

  1. Now, all over the world people love to eat and most of us have favourite food we like to cook.
  2. Often this involves a recipe
  3. that's written down instructions explaining how you combine the different items
  4. of food you are going to cook the ingredients into a meal.
  5. My favourite recipe is for bangers and mash –
  6. a cheap and popular British meal made of sausage and mashed potato.
  7. Cooking is a big part of our lives – something pleasurable we do with others,
  8. and a way of discovering the flavours and tastes of other cultures.
  9. In this programme,
  10. we'll be doing just that discovering the food culture of Ghana in West Africa
  11. and hearing about one woman's quest to preserve her country's traditional recipes.
  12. And as usual, we'll be learning some related vocabulary along the way.
  13. But before we start, I have a question for you, Rob.
  14. Your favourite recipe is the classic British dish, bangers and mash.
  15. It's easy to understand why mashed potato is called mash,
  16. but how did sausages come to be known as bangers?
  17. Is it A, because bang is an old-fashioned word for pork,
  18. B, because sausage-making machines used to make a banging noise,
  19. or C, because sausages would explode in the frying pan, going bang?
  20. I think it's A.
  21. Bang is an old-fashioned word for pork.
  22. OK, Rob. I'll reveal the correct answer later.
  23. Food writer Abner Ofejima was born in Ghana but moved to Canada as a child.
  24. After school, she would go for burgers and fries with friends
  25. before heading home to eat traditional Ghanaian food with her family,
  26. food cooked with ingredients like dawa-dawa.
  27. a spice made from roasting locust beans, and fufu.
  28. Her mother's cooking gave Abner a love of traditional recipes,
  29. so much so that five years ago she moved back to Ghana to rediscover her country's food culture.
  30. But when she arrived, Abner was surprised how much things had changed.
  31. Many traditional spices and ingredients were no longer being used
  32. and it was more common to see tomato ketchup
  33. than Ghanaian chipotle sauce.
  34. Here, Abner describes how her grandparents used to cook in the old days,
  35. to BBC World Service programme, The Food Chain.
  36. So they would actually cook the yam,
  37. you would cook the plantain, and they would use,
  38. you know, the mortar and the pestle to actually pound it, you know.
  39. Now in Ghana, you could just buy potato flour and just make fufu on the stove.
  40. But we're losing that, right?
  41. That communal experience of cutting the yam and cutting the plantain and cooking it.
  42. Abner's grandparents made fufu the traditional way,
  43. using ingredients like yam and green bananas called plantains.
  44. These were placed in a mortar and pestle – cooking equipment made of a bowl and a heavy stone ,
  45. which is used to grind ingredients together.
  46. The traditional method was to pound fufu.
  47. to crush it into a paste or powder.
  48. But nowadays, many people buy ready-made flour and cook fufu the modern way – on a stove.
  49. For Abner, this represented an unwelcome departure from ancestral ways of cooking
  50. and she decided that something had to be done.
  51. Here's Ruth Alexander,
  52. presenter of BBC World Service's The Food Chain, to continue the story.
  53. Abena was so taken aback by the loss of know-how about Ghana's traditional recipes
  54. and ingredients in the towns and cities
  55. that she decided she had to do something
  56. and set off to rural areas on a fact-finding tour.
  57. We travelled across the Upper East region in Ghana just to document
  58. indigenous dishes and to ask what are people eating now
  59. and learning that a lot of dishes are lost.
  60. Abner was taken aback by the changes in Ghana's food culture.
  61. She felt shocked and surprised.
  62. Traditionally, recipes were passed down orally from mother to daughter instead of being written down,
  63. so a generation of young Ghanaians were losing cooking know-how –
  64. the practical skills and knowledge of how to do something.
  65. Abner travelled around Ghana to document traditional recipes.
  66. to record information about them by writing them down or taking photos before they were lost forever.
  67. If her story has inspired you to find out about your own country's traditional recipes,
  68. or discover more about Ghanaian cooking,
  69. you can read more on Abner's website, Living the Ancestral Way.
  70. And after all this talk of traditional Ghanaian food,
  71. it's time for your question about a traditional British recipe – bangers and mash,
  72. or sausage and mashed potato.
  73. Now, you asked me about the name banger and I guessed that bang was an old-fashioned word for pork.
  74. So, was I right?
  75. You were wrong, I'm afraid, Rob.
  76. The name banger started in World War One when meat shortages resulted in sausages being made using water.
  77. That caused them to explode – going bang – when cooked.
  78. Well, that's certainly one way to spice up your cooking.
  79. OK, let's recap the rest of the vocabulary,
  80. starting with mortar and pestle – a bowl and a heavy stone which is used to grind ingredients together.
  81. To pound something means to crush it into a paste or powder.
  82. If you're taken aback, you feel shocked and surprised.
  83. Know-how is the practical skill and knowledge needed to do something, such as cook.
  84. And finally, the verb document means to record information about something by writing about it or taking photos.