Her mother’s passion

Transcript: Pandora Hodge, social entrepreneur from Liberia

So we have a lot of food in Liberia that people from different ethnic groups see as their traditional soup. So I’m from Maryland County. My family originally are from there and our traditional soup is palm butter. So palm butter is from the palm nut. If you’ve heard about the palm tree. We consider the palm tree as, like, the mother tree of Africa. Because of the palm tree, you can have so many things. You can make soup from the palm tree. You can use the palm tree, the leaf of the palm tree, as a roof cover for your house. You can make brooms from the palm tree. You can make fishing nets. Like, you can get palm wine from the palm tree. You can get the palm nut for palm oil, the red oil. And from the palm nut, the skin of the palm nut, the red part of it, that’s what we use to make our traditional soup. It’s called palm butter.

We also have potato greens; potato greens, most everybody loves potato greens. It’s one of our favorite dishes. You can have it... It’s from the sweet potatoes. So it’s the sweet potato leaf is what we call the potato greens. So you can have the potato greens; you take the greens and you slice it and you fry it with vegetable oil. You can have it with fish or chicken. And it’s very, very nice. We also have the cassava leaf. The cassava leaf is the leaf of the cassava. We cook that too. We cook it with palm oil and it’s very, very nice. You put your nice dry fish in it and, oh, it’s so good. Yeah, so we have a lot of soup. We have beans; we cook a lot of beans here too. And the Liberians, we love cooking. We love, we love, we love cooking, really.