foo-foo
See also: foofoo, FooFoo, and fufú
English
Alternative forms
- foofoo
- fufu
Etymology
From West African languages such as Ewe, fufú meaning 'white-white'
Noun
foo-foo (uncountable)
- A dish of boiled, mashed yams, plantain, or other starchy vegetables, common as food in West and Equatorial Africa and the Caribbean. Sold in speciality stores (US) in dry powdered or granulated form.
- 1958, Chinua Achebe, chapter 11, in Things Fall Apart:
- Ezinma and her mother sat on a mat on the floor after their supper of yam foo-foo and bitter-leaf soup.
- 1991, Elechi Amadi, The concubine, page 45:
- There was so much fish and meat in the soup that they had to put them on a separate plate, to facilitate the free movement of their balls of foo-foo in the soup
- 2007, Elphinstone Dayrell, Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, page 35:
- The king, however, refused to do this; but as he was rather sorry for the tortoise, he said he would present him with a magic foo-foo tree, which would the tortoise and his family with food, […] Every day it dropped foo-foo and soup on the ground.
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Synonyms
- (dish of yams etc): choke-me (Caribbean)
See also
- foo-foo band
References
- Frederic Gomes Cassidy and Robert Brock Le Page (editors), Dictionary of Jamaican English, Second Edition, University of the West Indies Press (2002), page 185.