Black-Eyed Pea Fritters: Michael W. Twitty’s Accara Recipe

Michael W. Twitty is an award-winning food historian, writer, and speaker. The author of the groundbreaking book The Cooking Gene, which chronicles the exploration of his family history and the impact of enslaved Africans on cooking practices and agriculture in the American South, Michael has become one of the country’s go-to scholars on African American food. Combining both his African American and Jewish identities in his dishes, ingredients, and cooking techniques, Michael uses food to explore how history and ancestry show up in kitchens.

West African fried accara (also spelled akara) fritters are dense, chewy, deep-fried treats made with black-eyed peas, popular in many African countries. Black-eyed peas hold a special place in African and African American cooking. In Senegal, cooking a pot of nyebe (the Wolof name for the legume) is a way of providing for others. In the United States, the legumes are a symbol of future prosperity eaten at midnight on New Year’s Eve in many Black households.

Here’s how to make savory black-eyed pea fritters with creamy interiors and crispy exteriors.

1. 1. Soak the black-eyed peas overnight. Soaking the black-eyed peas overnight loosens their skins, making them easier to rub off. Removing the skins is an extra step that yields creamy fritters with a uniform texture and color.
2. 2. Fry with peanut oil. Many chefs prefer deep-frying with peanut oil, which has a high smoke point and doesn’t produce off-flavors. Groundnuts (peanuts) are also historically and culturally significant: Enslaved Africans who arrived in the American colonies in the 1700s brought groundnuts with them. Around the early 1800s, groundnuts became a commercial crop in the Southern United States, starting in Virginia.
3. 3. Buy Maggi cubes. Invented in Switzerland in the late 1800s, these savory, umami-forward cubes are a popular, time-saving seasoning and stock base. In West African cuisine, Maggi cubes sometimes supplant traditional flavorings such as soumbala (the seeds of the néré tree), which can be time-consuming to prepare and difficult to acquire. One of the most common ways to use Maggi cubes is as bouillon cubes in stew or jollof rice in place of chicken stock. You can find Maggi cubes at most supermarkets.