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The first time I
heard of Alkaki was from one of the owners of Abule Café. The café is
part of The Life House on Sinari Daranijo Street in Victoria Island,
Lagos. Abule simply means village, and the owners have a strong
suggestion of an organic approach to their sparse but interesting menu.

I have to admit to
liking the way their minds work. It is refreshing to have a place where
you can go for a snack of a bowl of gari, iced water and groundnuts in
the afternoon comfortably sipped in air conditioning while surfing the
Internet…or their own charming version of Buck’s Fizz, a combination
of champagne and zobo; or their delicious Chapman’s made from freshly
squeezed watermelon and other fruit juices, Angostura bitters and
additional well guarded secret ingredients. Theirs is the very first
Chapman’s that I have drunk with an unsuspecting and tranquil mind.

One of my favourite
Abule Café stories is that of fresh palmwine available there from the
beginning of the week. A nursing mother who wants to bring on the
breast milk can go in at the start of the week and drink this palmwine
and at the weekend when it is fully and irredeemably fermented, those
wishing to mainline alcohol can go in and get unrepentantly drunk.

Abule Café’s Alkaki
comes from a friend of the house who makes them somewhere in the North
and sends them down to Lagos. It is apparent that they are carefully
and lovingly made. They are made up of twists of fried wheat dough
soaked in honey. In texture and taste they remind me of what I consider
the best honey wheat bread available in Nigeria sold by High Quality
Bakery in Calabar. The Alkaki, like the honey wheat is grainy, dense,
sweet (sweeter) crumbly and honey infused. A piece of the pastry broken
off reveals hidden silken tracks of honey. It is best served fresh, or
warmed in the oven, with a cup of coffee or Lipton tea.

Also Alkaki has
pedigree. It was originally the preserve of Northern aristocrats who
had it for tea or as a desert. I like to imagine Fulani ladies draped
in limited edition Hollandaise Ankara sitting under alcoves ordering
one such as myself about with trays of Alkaki, cold Lassis,

Fura and hot
fragrant teas, talking about the year’s yield of tea on plantations in
Taraba State in soft cultured voices. Alkaki has strong strains of
Arabic cuisine where desserts and puddings are prepared with wheat
flour, yoghurt and always always always, drenched in honey.

I asked Ugoma
Ebilah, who owns Abule with her husband, to request the summary of the
recipe for Alkaki from their Northern friend and was by and by snubbed.
I didn’t take it to heart. In a country of over 150 million people, no
Nigerian recipe can be successfully enshrouded. I finally stumbled on a
version in my old tattered Maggi family menu cookbook made from 2 cups
of crushed wheat, 2 teaspoons of yoghurt, 1 bottle of groundnut oil, 2
cups of honey and 2 tablespoons of lime juice. The methodology is also
simple enough.

Instead of crushed
wheat, I bought a N50 peak-milk-tin measurement of whole wheat sold out
of a huge Dangote bag. I ground a few handfuls of the wheat to coarse
flour in my blender’s dry mill, sieved it and added to the sieved
flour, yoghurt and about three spoons of groundnut oil, enough to
loosely hold the dough together. I must admit to substituting the lime
juice for water and also that something about the ground wheat
suggested and even demanded the addition of a handful of coriander
seeds. The dough must be left for a few hours or overnight to ferment.
The remaining oil is heated, the dough fried in it till the Alkaki is
the colour of golden honey. The Alkaki is removed from the heat and
submerged in a jar of honey. From experimenting, I found that they must
be submerged for a period of time to get an impressive infusion.

My Alkaki certainly does not have the well-dressed look of Café
Abule’s. Their friend has so perfected the art of making them, of
twisting the dough together to look like small pretty twisted brioches,
and has probably done this for years that I certainly cannot begin to
compete. But the taste of mine was commensurate if not better for being
freshly made, with a grainier bite from the coarseness of the flour and
coriander seeds, also fragrant from the coriander, honey sweet and
certainly worth the roundabout research and snobbery.