Peto

A hearty Tiv meal made by cooking yam or sweet potato together with palm oil and green vegetables in a single pot. It is nourishing, filling, and commonly enjoyed as a family meal. Also known as Akuto (also spelled akutor) when made with sweet potato.

Yam or sweet potato, palm oil, green vegetables (leafy greens), local seasoning

Yam or sweet potato is chopped and cooked with palm oil and greens until soft and well-seasoned. All ingredients are cooked together in one pot until tender.

Served as a main meal, particularly for family dining. Eaten on its own without additional soup.

Represents the Tiv preference for earthy, filling, one-pot traditional meals. It demonstrates how Tiv cuisine combines root crops and vegetables into nourishing complete dishes.

Peto brings together the two root crops at the centre of Tiv farming. Yam is the most valued; Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, lists dozens of varieties in three groups (nuangegh, agbo and anumbe), and anumbe, a yellowish, slightly sour tuber, was among the first food crops the Tiv grew. Sweet potato came later. Akiga records that it was introduced by the Hausa and first known by the Hausa name dankali, and that in the past old, worked-out farm land was thought good only for minor crops such as sweet potatoes.

He gives the stories behind some of its Tiv names. Atsaka recalls a man whose wife refused to cook for his in-law, so he roasted a sweet potato for the guest rather than let him go to bed hungry. Akamitiôr comes from the Kunav clan, whose soil suits sweet potatoes better than yams: mashed sweet potato will not hold together like pounded yam, so the eater must keep a hand raised to stop it falling.

Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a scrambling perennial that forms tubers wherever its stems root, and is one of only seven world food crops with an annual harvest of more than 100 million tonnes. Its young shoot tips are also cooked and eaten like spinach, so the same plant can supply both the tuber and the greens of a one-pot meal.

The sweet-potato version has its own name, Akuto, also spelled akutor. A 2019 recipe on the Tiv Food Recipes blog cooks chopped sweet potatoes in water with salt, pepper and seasoning, adds palm oil, and finishes the pot with sesame seeds that have been fried until lightly brown and ground; some cooks mash part of the potatoes and some leave them whole.

Sources: Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Harold M. Bergsma and Martin L. Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.); Tiv Food Recipes (mytivfoodrecipes.blogspot.com), "How to make Akutor (Tiv sweet potato pottage)", 31 July 2019.

See the Tiv people and the Tiv language in our Nigeria Heritage Archive: the states and local government areas where Tiv communities live, neighbouring peoples, population figures and sources.