Thanks for the info – I did a little digging – and at least according to the couple of African cookbooks I’ve got here, foufou is a catch-all term meaning, essentially, mush – cassava (manioc, yucca, tapioca root) is one of the most commonly used starches, being the main staple of much of West African cuisine, but foufou is also made from sweet potato, plantain, rice, corn, and other grains. It seems the further you get from the coastal area in the far west, the more likely it is to be something else, probably, just based on intuition, because the staple grain is different (i.e., in South Africa it seems to almost all be corn-based).

In terms of the food at El Buen Sabor – since I didn’t ask the guys where they were from, it’s hard to say if the use of semolina for their foufou is their tradition, or because they found it easier to get semolina than cassava flour here (which is available, but generally requires a trip to either Barrio Chino or out to the Bolivian markets in Liniers). However, the majority of the new wave of African immigration here, at least based on a couple of news reports, has been from Nigeria and Cameroon, and perhaps it’s as simple as that difference – though, English is more likely to be spoken in those two countries than French. There’s also a population from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Liberia that’s growing, again, the latter two English is more common, so perhaps we can guess that these guys are from Senegal… or maybe somewhere else entirely. Easiest, of course, would be simply to ask them – and had one of them paid attention to the dining room long enough to have a conversation, I might have just done so.

Well then, certainly on that account, they hit the nail on the head! It’s unusual that I find a hot sauce to be too much for me, but this one was just a touch over the line, though toned down with the sweet tomato sauce it was great!