This is Nigerian corn mosa, and I wager it is connected to hot water cornbread from the American South. For now, let’s begin with corn mosa.
It is one of two mosas, fritters I know in Nigeria. The other one is plantain or banana mosa, part of the quartet or sextuplet of Nigerian Small Chops.
Through a combination of methods like recipe biography, recipe etymology, I try to figure out what the recipe is, what the ingredients are/ mean, and how it’s changed through time.
This all began because one day in 2018, or 2019, I came across a food seller hawking corn mosa at New Market, Oniru – Lagos. The huge bowl she had was full of corn snacks, which were extremely light – and it’s no wonder as she carried the huge bag of the snacks with ease, something she wouldn’t have been able to do if the fritters were heavy. She had three types fashioned from dried corn I think. For a minute, I thought the soft corn mosa was made from fresh corn but it is also likely that it is a different cooking process that shapes the outcome.
In this case, I think the lighter coloured mosa were either made with fresh corn or fried once, and the deeper brown ones which were crunchy, were made with dry corn and maybe fried twice. And then you have the crumbs sold in small bags which colour-wise look like they are from the darker fritters. Nigerians love crunch, and soft, and crunch :). I call it the love for krum-krum.
She served them with a sprinkling of sugar. Experiencing this inspired me to research so I could better understand the origins of mosa, and trace it as far back as I could.
I turned to the oldest cookbooks I could find, that mentioned mosa. In the 2002 repackaged edition of the Kudeti Book of Yoruba Cookery, originally published in 1934, there was a recipe. . The Kudeti cookbook is one of the earliest documentations of Nigerian cuisine after Practical West African Cookery, which despite its name, is composed of mostly Nigerian recipes, the authors lived in the north of Nigeria, and speak to that audience.
I have several copies of the Kudeti book – 1940 revised, 1965 2nd edition, 1979 3rd edition, and the 2002 repackaged. It is interesting or should I say, I find it interesting to review the recipes and observe changes – to ingredients, words, methods, and more. The differences speak to multiple things – changes in currency for example.
The first thing I looked for was the recipe for corn mosa in all 4 books to see if there was a time period I could anchor it in. It is present in all 4 so I can say it’s likely it’s been a feature since at least the early 1900s. I look forward to someday seeing the 1934 copy and checking for the recipe.
The other thing is that in all 4 recipes the ingredients list is similar. In all 4, the first ingredient, some kind of corn, related to ogi – a pap known as ogi, akamu, pap, was “eyin ogi” referenced by the cost and not by quantities. Today, that wouldn’t hold well as a way of speaking to quantities because price and quantity don’t correlate the way I imagine they might have done in the past.
Then there was sugar, also noted by cost not quantity.
The final ingredient listed was Fried oil, which changed in the 2002 edition to Oil for frying.
So what’s eyin ogi?
From my basic knowledge of Yoruba, and ogi, I translated eyin ogi – eggs of ogi. Ogi is a fermented corn product made by soaking dry corn kernels in water for a few days, changing the water daily until it ferments then rinsing, grinding, and passing to separate the smooth starch from the chaff.
I looked up eyin ogi in 3 dictionaries and vocabularies of Yoruba Language from 1852, and 1858 which confirmed what I already knew – it was made from corn, somehow connected to Ogi, and the process of making it.
So what else do the recipes say?
Have a look.
They highlight currency changes from 1940 to 2002. Some notes:
- Between 1912 and 1959, the West African Currency Board (WACB) issued pounds and Shillings and acted as the central bank for British colonies of the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast and Nigeria. It was succeeded by the Bank of Ghana in 1958, Central Bank of Nigeria in 1959, Bank of Sierra Leone in 1964, and The Gambia Currency Board in 1965.
- The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was established in 1958 and assumed control from the WACB in 1959. It introduced “Nigerianized” notes though they were still of Pounds and Shillings. They featured national imagery, agriculture, and commerce instead of colonial insignia.
- The Nigerian Naira and Kobo were introduced in 1973, replacing the Nigerian Pound and Shilling, and remain to this day though the kobo is all but gone. Everything is priced in Naira.
They say something about sugar, and you see different types from the Jack Frost brand to “unnamed” cubes likely St. Louis sugar in a blue packet which dominated the market for decades. Some reflections:
- Lumps of sugar were popular for decades before cubes were invented and generally a lump represented a teaspoon of sugar.
In William Bascom‘s January 1951 Yoruba Food paper in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, he describes a selection of things made with corn in Ile-Ife, amongst the Yoruba.
He also describes approaches, methods, and ingredients used in Yoruba cuisine in the 1950s in Ile-Ife.
But who was William Bascom? He “was the first American anthropologist to do field work among the Yoruba people of Nigeria. He made his first trip to Nigeria in 1937 at the age of 25. Over the next 23 years he spent a total of 5 years among the Yoruba, learning their culture and folklore and describing in detail all aspects of their life. During his many periods of residence in Nigeria, he and his wife Berta Montero Bascom assembled one of the foremost collections of books and art of the Yoruba people, their folklore, and history.”
In his April 1951 paper, Yoruba Cooking, the second of two papers on Yoruba cuisine, he describes the corn fritters referenced in Yoruba food as Lapata, and describes how it is made.
The 1852 A vocabulary of the Yoruba language lists akara-lapata as a cake made of maize.
The vocabulary also gives massa (probably also masa, and likely with Indigenous American roots) as an alternative name for lapata.
At first I thought lapata was the same as corn mosa but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
William describes corn mosa as being made from eyin ogi “(93) mosa (masa) is made by grinding the ‘eggs’ (eyin) with sugar, adding a little water, moulding into lumps, and frying in oil.”
Eyin ogi is described as a by-product of making ogi. The “…coarse particles of the flesh of broken kernels, known as ‘eggs’ (eyin,eyin ogi), and the unbroken kernels, which remain at the bottom of the first pot,…
Here’s the excerpt of the full process for making cornstarch/ ogi (I’ve parsed the text into paragraphs for legibility):
Dried kernels of corn are soaked in water for from one to four days or, if one is in a hurry, they can be boiled (bo) for two or three hours. The corn is then rinsed in fresh water, allowed to drain in a basket, and then pounded in a large wooden mortar. Water is added so that the skins (ese) of the kernels float to the surface and can be skimmed off with a strainer (asf). The water is then dipped out of the first pot and strained (se) through the strainer into a second pot, catching the remaining skins, which are sold or used as food for guinea fowl, rabbits, goats, or sheep.
The coarse particles of the flesh of broken kernels, known as ‘eggs’ (eyin, eyin ogi), and the unbroken kernels, which remain at the bottom of the first pot, are put back into the mortar and pounded again or are ground on a grinding stone. The skins are again floated and caught in a strainer, using water from the top of the second pot so that the solution does not become too diluted. Any kernels and ‘eggs’ which still remain are pounded or ground again, the process being repeated four or five times, or more if new corn has been added, until so little remains at the bottom that it is not worth while continuing.
The remainder is thrown away, since it spoils quickly and will not keep overnight, and is usually eaten by chickens and goats. The second pot is allowed to stand overnight, so that the partially fermented cornstarch (ogi) settles to the bottom. On the following day the liquid (omi ekan) on top of the flour is carefully dipped off and may be used in place of water in preparing gruel (7). The cornstarch itself is used in preparing cornstarch gruel (7) and cornstarch porridge (14).
From the descriptions he gives, while lapata is made with whole fresh or dried corn, mosa is made with the remains from preparing ogi. While there’s pepper in lapata, no mention of that is made in the case of mosa which features sugar. These appear to be two distinct dishes.
Eyin ogi is also described as grits of some sort, mostly of the corn fibre, kernels (?). A reference to eyin is made related to yam “similar yam grits.”
There is also a cross-reference with the Kudeti Book of Yoruba Cookery. Bascom in the footnotes suggests that sugar here is a substitute for salt, reflecting European influence.
In conclusion, there were historically several fritter like corn-based dishes, and nothing went to waste.
It also struck me that lapata and hot water cornbread made in the American South bear some resemblance to one another, at least ingredient-wise, if not shape.
In the 2019 book, Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin, there is a recipe for Hot Water Cornbread. In the headnotes, there are several ways to shape the batter (of cornmeal mixed with boiling water or scalded whole milk) and two catch my eye – “shaped into small pones, dropped by the spoonful onto a hot griddle….”. Both of these methods suggest small, thick cakes/ breads. Lapata, per Bascom’s description are formed into round balls, not disimilar to corn mosa.
Anyway, there you have it, some untangling of words like eyin ogi, and how they relate to corn masa, and lapata, and hot water cornbread.
I leave you with two recipes I’ve come across on the interwebs.
The first one showed two examples – soaked corn that was blended, seasoned and then split in two.
This recipe uses ground cornmeal, and uses baking powder to leaven. She shares that some people use akaun, an alkali salt. This is similar but for the shape, to a hot water cornbread recipe by Vallery Lomas in the Wall Street Journal.
So what do you know about lapata, corn mosa, and hot water corn bread? Share all.
As for me, I’ve done my bit :).
I will tackle sugar and Jack Frost some other day!
