Mande Food
Courtesy of The New York Public Library
Mande speakers (also identified in historical documents as Mandingo and Mandinka) lived in the geographic area of present-day Liberia. The Mande make a dish called kibbeh which is a ball or torpedo-shaped fried croquette stuffed with minced lamb. “So delicious did I find it,” writes the French and Italian adventurer and slave trader Theodore Canot in the 1800s, “that, even at this distance of time, my mouth waters when I remember the forced meat balls of mutton, minced with roasted ground nuts, that I devoured that night in the Mandingo town of Kya.”
