Nigeria Food Collection

Nigerian food culture is loud in the best sense. It is a cuisine of big pots, long simmering, deep colour and unapologetic spice — and above all of abundance. You cook for the people at the table and for the people who might arrive. To serve someone a small portion is close to an insult; to send them home with a container is ordinary courtesy.

With more than two hundred and fifty ethnic groups, there is no single Nigerian kitchen. Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Efik, Tiv and Ijaw traditions each bring their own staples and techniques. What binds them is a shared grammar: a pepper base, a starch to swallow with, and a table built for company.

Almost everything begins with the blend — tomato, red bell pepper, scotch bonnet and onion, pureed and fried down slowly in oil until the raw sharpness cooks off and the oil floats to the surface. From this comes jollof rice, cooked until the bottom of the pot catches and lends the whole thing its faint smokiness, and the stew that dresses rice, beans, yam and fried plantain.

Then the soups, eaten with a swallow rather than a spoon. Egusi, thickened with ground melon seed and studded with greens and meat. Ogbono, drawn and glossy. Okra soup. Efo riro heavy with spinach and locust bean. Banga from the Delta, made with palm fruit. Each is torn into with pounded yam, eba, amala or fufu — a small ball pressed with the thumb, dipped, swallowed whole.

As evening falls the mai suya lights his grill. Thin sheets of beef are skewered, coated in yaji — ground peanut, chilli, ginger, cloves — and turned over coals until the fat crisps at the edges. It is wrapped in paper with raw onion and tomato and eaten standing up.

Around it, the rest of Nigeria's street food: akara bean fritters at dawn, puff puff fried golden and dusted with sugar, boli roasted plantain with groundnut, moin moin steamed in leaves, chin chin bagged for the road. Washed down with zobo, chapman or a cold bottle of malt.

Nigerian celebration cooking deserves its own chapter. At an owambe — the great Yoruba party tradition — jollof and fried rice arrive in trays, alongside asun goat, moin moin, peppered snails, small chops and coolers of stew, all served in matching aso ebi fabric under a canopy of music. Food is the measure of the host's generosity, and everyone notices.

Even the everyday meals carry a trace of this. Sunday rice, a pot of beans with plantain, jollof made in a quantity nobody would call sensible — these are ways of saying that the door is open.

Our Nigeria collection draws together the flavours that define that generosity — jollof rice, egusi, suya, puff puff, plantain, pounded yam and a cold bottle of malt — in a single bold illustrated composition.

Every Nigeria piece is printed and shipped through our Etsy shop: posters, aprons, blankets, sweaters and tote bags for anyone who has stirred a pot of stew for an hour, argued about jollof, or cooked far more than the table required.