State College expert in Ghanaian cuisine prepares to launch online store after pandemic setbacks

Once called “the godmother of African food blogging,” Fran Osseo-Asare has a long history educating others on the food culture and cuisine of her husband’s native Ghana. Having written multiple books on the subject, the State College woman turned her attention to creating an online marketplace focused on Ghanaian cuisine in late 2019, but her plans were quickly curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A year later, she’s looking ahead to her hopes for Betumi’s Kitchen.

“I was in Ghana a year ago ... when we got the frantic emails from our kids, ‘Come home now!’ We had to abruptly drop everything and rush home,” Osseo-Asare said. “I had to sever everything. It’s all been on hold, but hopefully this year will be different.”

Osseo-Asare first established herself as an expert in Ghanaian cuisine after spending a year in the country teaching in a fishing town along the coast.

“I loved the food,” she said. “The food in Ghana was spicy, with a lot of fermentation, a lot of fresh fish from the sea, and everyone had their gardens. You would pick your tomatoes and peppers fresh off the vine ... I became more and more annoyed by the bad press that African food, especially West African food, was getting.”

After attending graduate school at Penn State and focusing on rural sociology, and attending “one too many conferences where people were badmouthing African food as being horrible,” Osseo-Asare decided to set the record straight and, in 1997, launched the website that would become her online food blog, Betumi: The African Culinary Network.

Since then, Osseo-Asare has published “A Good Soup Attracts Chairs: A First African Cookbook for American Kids”; “Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa”; and, most recently, in 2016, “The Ghana Cookbook.”

“I tried to publish that book for 10 years,” she said. “When I first married, I had spent the year living in Ghana and my husband’s sister taught me a lot, but there was no cookbook I could turn to. (Ghanaians) have an oral tradition, so they don’t write down recipes. My sister-in-law kept laughing at me as I wrote things down, but I wanted a book that could help me navigate this.”

Now, Osseo-Asare says the internet has democratized African food culture, making it easy for any African to share information, recipes and videos.

“It’s become the latest, trendy, kind of hip thing, to know about African food,” she said, noting that change may have opened the door for her cookbook’s publication.

It was in late 2019, when looking for a project to fill her time post-publication, that Osseo-Asare decided to create the Betumi’s Kitchen online marketplace, a reaction to what she saw as not only an issue in Ghanaian culture, but also a way to continue her push to educate others on Ghanaian food.

“Whenever I go to Ghana, it irritates me that you have a country where they can’t grow wheat and there’s no dairy industry ... and yet, because it was a British colony, the epitome of what middle-class people aspire to is things like wheat bread and butter, things that are not available in Ghana,” she said. “It bothered me that, at Christmas, they get cookie cutters of Christmas trees and yule logs, snowflakes, and they buy imported cookies from the U.K. I said, ‘Wait, this is ridiculous. There must be a way to make shortbread cookies without having to use margarine — which is what they substitute for butter — and imported ingredients.’”

With assistance from the Penn State Small Business Development Center and Happy Valley LaunchBox, Osseo-Asare began developing a gluten-free, Ghana-friendly cookie recipe; taught herself 3-D printing in order to create cookie stamps and cookie cutters based on Ghanaian cultural symbols; and began working with culinary professionals and a seamstress in Ghana to further develop her line of Betumi’s Kitchen products. She was working on the project in Ghana when the pandemic began in early 2020.

“I usually go to Ghana twice a year. I can’t see myself going there this year,” she said.

In the meantime, she’s working to keep the Betumi: The African Culinary Network website active, and expects the online store to be operational in May. People can contact her to be placed on a waiting list for products.

Anyone interested in Osseo-Asare’s work and the upcoming products can learn more at https://betumi.com. Osseo-Asare can also be reached at fran@betumi.com.