puff-puff

Puff-puff is a West African deep-fried dough ball: flour, sugar, yeast, water, and sometimes nutmeg, rolled into rounds and dropped into hot oil until golden and hollow inside. In Nigeria it is sold at parties and roadside stalls by the bagful. In Ghana the same food goes by bofrot; in Cameroon the name puff-puff persists. Wherever the word appears, it is the same reduplicative English formation, and it describes the puffing of the dough as it rises in oil.

The origin of the name tracks the history of English contact along the West African coast. Portuguese traders arrived in the Gulf of Guinea in the fifteenth century, and their fried dough snacks left culinary traces along the littoral. Dutch and British traders followed, bringing their own frying traditions. By the nineteenth century English had become a commercial language across the coast, and local cooks adopted and adapted its sounds to name new foods. Puff-puff follows the same reduplicative pattern as other West African Pidgin words: chop-chop, dash-dash, go-go.

Nigerian cookbooks first recorded puff-puff in the 1960s and 1970s, by which time it had become a staple of street food culture in Lagos and Port Harcourt. Women frying puff-puff over open fires became a fixture of the Nigerian urban landscape, selling them in newspaper cones for a few kobo. The snack moved upward socially, and by the 1990s appeared on buffet tables at weddings and on the menus of Nigerian restaurants in London and Houston.

Food scholars sometimes compare puff-puff to the French beignet or the Spanish buñuelo, since fried dough appears wherever there is flour and oil. But puff-puff is its own thing: yeasted, slightly sweet, and cooked at a higher temperature than most European equivalents. The name has no European antecedent. It was coined in West Africa, by West Africans, to describe something they had made entirely their own.