I miss my mum's Nigerian cooking. Can she teach me over Zoom?

‘Well, let me see it then,” says my mother from the screen, her iPhone camera set to the trademark lockdown angle that means I’ve never been better acquainted with a specific patch of her living room ceiling. A little fearfully, reaching over a saucepan of bubbling oil, I do as I’m told: stick a spoon in the dense batter I’ve mixed to make my first ever West African “puff-puff” doughnuts, and hoick some up for inspection. “Hmm,” she says, squinting. “It looks a little heavy, son.”

“Do you think?” I say, doubtfully, picking up one of the misshapen dark brown blobs I’ve already fried and pulling it apart. A rope of wet, uncooked batter spills out over my fingers and it feels, for a moment, like the ghosts of my Nigerian ancestors have gathered at my shoulder to shake their heads sadly.

“Ha. Oh noooo. They’re raw, Mum,” I say, opening another with the same result.

“Ah! Raw? Oh dear,” she says, her voice managing to convey both kindness and a hint of quiet vindication.

Welcome, then, to the occasionally calamitous reality of my confined adventures in Nigerian cooking, a series of giddy highs and crushing lows that – given I make, or rather once made, my living as a London restaurant critic and one of MasterChef’s occasional expert face-stuffers – has felt at times like a particularly brutal act of self-inflicted poetic justice. The judger has become the judged. And my casual, early-lockdown notion that, guided by my mum over Zoom, I might recreate some of the dishes I grew up on has turned from a fun diversion into something messier, literally and figuratively; something that has caused me to spend wakeful nights fretting over the consistency of my jollof rice.

I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind, past the disastrous puff-puff, to the beginning of all this, when it seemed like the obvious solution to what must be a common familial side-effect of the pandemic. To put it simply, I not only miss someone I can no longer really see (my mum, as she would surely point out, doesn’t turn 70 until August, but has been extra careful about isolating), I also miss the small, everyday ways she used to express her love. While I don’t wish to perpetuate the immigrant-parent cliches, for my Nigerian-born mother, this inevitably meant food. Lots of it. All cooked with instinctive skill and the kind of ferocity that means if you want her to sit down and stop frying things while she has people over, you almost have to restrain her.

So, yes, I felt an acute, building ache for her repertoire of Nigerian dishes. And my wife and two young sons did, too, given that “Grandma Tuesdays” – the weekly childcare day that always ends with me arriving home from work to the welcoming, candied gust of frying plantain, Mum chaotically manning at least four hobs and the boys barely looking up from their dwindling mountains of jollof – are on an indefinite hiatus. Enlisting her as my distanced culinary Yoda seemed a perfect response to this strange new life. I would get to plug the shameful gap in my abilities when it came to West African cooking; my kids would not be denied jollof, one of the few vaguely nutritious dishes they devour without complaint; and my mum, always bereft when she isn’t able to test the stomach capacity of half a dozen hungry guests, could ease the isolated boredom while feeding us from afar.

I fancy myself as pretty good in the kitchen (what is a restaurant critic, really, if not an extremely mouthy back-seat driver?) but I wanted this to be about culture, paying something forward, and seeing if I could emulate food that represents so much more than a full belly. “P45 on the way for me!” my mum messaged, with a few declarative cry-laugh emojis, when I first floated the idea. Maudlin as it may sound, I was hoping to offer her immortality rather than obsolescence.

Initially, all I really offered were shamefully basic teleconferenced queries. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, Mum, but how do I peel this yam?” I said, in one lamentable early video call, as I stared down the gnarled tuber. Here, I think, we alight on the elephant in the room: why, as a 36-year-old who cooks constantly and writes about food for work, was I only now expressing curiosity in how these ancestral dishes are prepared? How had I managed to go through life voraciously consuming recipes for Italian, French or Mexican cuisine, with such a glaring blind spot where my own heritage was concerned?

The selective laziness of the Nigerian princeling cannot be fully discounted. My mum is unapologetic about the patriarchal roots of her brand of West African hospitality (“Our parents made sure we learned to cook good meals so our husbands would always come home for more!” ran another emoji-studded message) and, though I’ve loudly opposed this culture, I know I’ve been its silent beneficiary: barely stepping into the kitchen at sprawling family gatherings; fully regressing from self-sufficient grownup to coddled, sofa-bound teenager the moment I cross the threshold into my mum’s house.

There is, I think, another reason I gravitated towards other cuisines. As a cookery show-obsessed kid, I wanted to stake out culinary ground that was mine and mine alone. It was a way to underline the difference between my generation and that of my parents. Why make a lesser version of Mum’s egusi soup (a melon seed stew with an addictive, faintly sour edge) when I could strike out on my own, with something that had less baggage?

Whatever the cause, this regrettable knowledge gap made for some bumpy moments during my first remote lessons. After prepping that yam (you winnow off the tough, nubby exterior with a hefty knife, then cut it into thick rounds), I learned the hard way that careful arrangement of the slices in a lidded steaming pan is key if you don’t want some of them to be challengingly al dente. I also made what I thought was a fairly successful jollof (the trick, according to Mum’s lengthy WhatsApp’d recipe and Zoom instructions, is a very low, methodical simmer), only to have the three-year-old practically flip the table over because I’d left a few visible shreds of onion in there.

It has been a mountainous learning curve, but a rewarding one (in the end, I do manage to get the puff-puff to work, with smaller dollops of batter and a less ferocious hob setting). Trying to master it all, while filling the house with sweet, starchy smells that were a squirt of industrial-strength bug killer away from the bottled scent of my childhood, has felt like the perfect, comforting puzzle for drifting lockdown days. It has given me a new appreciation for the toil that goes into each beloved dish and reminded me that I can instinctively adapt things (the addition of chicken schmaltz to jollof, a vaguely cheffy dribble of spinach and scotch bonnet salsa over the yam and fiery beef stew) the same way I would any recipe.

Related: 10 things the lockdown has taught me about food

More than this, it has given my mum and me an excuse to embark on a shared project together; one where I stop scolding her about her life-endangering runs to the Big Sainsbury’s long enough to admit that, yes, maybe there are still things she can teach me. “Oh, it’s been great,” she says, when I ask her. “I think it’s making me a better cook as well, measuring things and timing myself.”

And for me, hunched over a billowing pan of rice, rhythmically stirring and thwacking a spoon on the edge just as she always does, it has been a chance to momentarily bring her bustling back into the room. It is not the same as the whirl of Tuesdays, with three generations of us huddled in close, and Mum at the stove, chiding me for pinching another scalding, fresh-fried piece of plantain. Yet we are all having to find ways to sustain ourselves, until the patterns of old lives can be restored. Like my attempts at my mum’s Nigerian standards, it is far from perfect. But, right now, it feels like exactly what we need.

Kofo Famurewa’s Nigerian puff-puff recipe

Makes 26-30 balls

375g plain flour
1 sachet fast action yeast
½ tsp grated nutmeg
1 good pinch salt
200g sugar (plus extra for sprinkling)
2 cups lukewarm water
Vegetable oil for deep frying

Combine the dry ingredients in a deep bowl. Add the water, a little at a time, and mix with your hands or a wooden spoon until it is the consistency of thick, smooth pancake batter. Cover with both clingfilm and tea towels (or even a jacket) and leave in a warm place to rise for 45 minutes. Heat at least three inches of oil in a saucepan, then, with either fingers or a spoon, scoop modest, level tablespoon-sized balls of the risen mix and plop into the oil. Fry in batches until golden brown. Sprinkle with extra sugar and eat immediately.