A dumpling-like dough made from a cooked starch and meant to accompany soups and stews, swallows are a full category of food in our recipe index.

Known generally to the Yorùbá-speaking people of South West Nigeria as ‘òkèlè’, to the Igbo-speaking people in the South East as ‘ụtara’ and to the Fulani and Hausa people of the Sahel and savanna regions of the North as ‘tuwo’ or ‘nyiir’, they get their English name (swallows) for their ability to be eaten without the need to chew. If you’ve ever moulded a starch with your fingers and then used it to scoop a flavoured broth or sauce directly into your mouth, you understand the modest role of a swallow.

I love considering the powerful interplay between dishes. Light broth, thickened stew, hearty porridge, sinewy draw soup or pepper sauce – all are opportunities to hover my whole face over, to intimately understand the dish’s qualities with all my senses. These are the comforting kinds of meals I make most often at home. Whether I’m trying to master a novel soup that I’ve experienced on a recent outing or conjure a stew straight out of dreams from my Nigerian childhood, I’m always thinking about which kind of swallow will be its brilliant sidekick.

Learning to make stews will invite you into a world of starches and redefine your relationship with your favourite dishes. It’s a topic I’ve covered before, but I’ve found myself wanting to say more. There’s so much to say about swallows.

The list below is by no means comprehensive. I would have loved to have gone deeper into others, like the East African Highland banana swallow, made from matoke, a green fruit similar to plantain. There’s also Ghana’s firm kenkey, made from fermented maize, and the dainty omo tuo (tuwo), from cooked rice. And don’t forget about bespoke banku, a mix of cassava and maize. Some styles cross many parts of Africa, such as amala, made from a dried, fermented plantain or yam flour, and semolina, made from durum wheat.

Ingredient availability defines the styles, and, in essence, any available starch is an opportunity. Swallows contain myriad possibilities, and that’s what should keep you coming back. With an understanding of a few key techniques, you can broaden your relationship to the starches that sustain you.

Traditionally, making stews is a multistep process of simmering a starch in a pot until it softens.

A large mortar and pestle is then used to crush and pound the tender pieces into a dough. While still hot, the dough is kneaded against the side of the mortar until it’s rich, smooth and elastic.

My preparation has you instead make a slurry and then cook it while stirring to avoid any lumpy pockets. It thickens into a soft dough, which is repeatedly folded and kneaded against the side of the pot over heat. In both cases, after a bit of an arm workout, the starches relax and take on a gluten-like, stretchy texture in a process that is quite magical to behold.

I’m learning to cook, eat and exist with significant changes in my abilities, including the loss of digits on both hands. The classic technique of pinching and rolling a small bit of swallow in between my index finger, middle finger and thumb is a distant desire. But my prosthetic hands are a point of pride, an enabler of sorts. Meals have become a time for discovery, as I find myself wielding a fork or spoon to eat my swallow. We should each bring the swallow to our lips, however we’re able. It will nourish us all the same.

A staple crop across the Caribbean, West and Central Africa and South America, the West African yam, not to be confused with a sweet potato, grows underground as a magnificently large tuber. It goes by many regional names: ‘ìyán’ in the Yoruba-speaking part of Nigeria, ‘igname pilée’ in Benin, ‘yam fufu’ in Ghana and ‘foutou’ in Ivory Coast, to name a few.

The process of making it can be exhilarating and exhausting. It never fails to surprise me how the crumbly-looking starch is transformed into something glossy and stretchy after minutes of repeated folding. As a yam swallow, iyán shares the name of its main ingredient. As dense as it is, it provides nourishment and sustenance throughout the day.

This recipe is for anyone who truly enjoys the subtle and mild taste that only fresh yam can provide.

It skips a few steps for convenience: The peeled yam is puréed in a blender and then cooked into a stiff, pliable dough.

PAIR IT WITH vegetable-rich stews like èfọ́ rírò or ègúsí or a saucy braised meat for a deeply satisfying meal — comfort in a bowl.

Flours milled from grains or any starch can be the basis for savouries, with each imparting a particular flavour and texture. Grains such as maize, millet and sorghum, and tubers such as yams, cassava and potatoes all star in different stews across Africa. Across East Africa, a swallow, like this one, made from milled white maize flour (called mahindi flour), goes by different names: ugali, posho, nsima and sadza.

Although you may be tempted to use a yellow cornmeal, you may not get the same results. The white cornmeal is starchy and lends itself well to vigorous folding.

PAIR IT WITH Any vegetable soup, such as light soup, the spinach-rich cagaar, the coconut-laden kuku paka or any grilled beef kebabs.

Cassava shows up in different dishes and in many forms — grated, crushed, fermented and dried — across Africa. It’s also found as a flour, known as ‘garri’ or ‘gari’ across West and Central Africa and ‘farofa’ in Brazil. Cassava stews have a woodsy depth and can range from mild to sour, depending on how lengthy the fermentation process has been.

When garri is made into a swallow, it is known as eba or generally as fufu in the diaspora. The garri swallow recipe here is lightly seasoned with a bit of red palm oil, giving it a notably bright colour and a floral flavour.

Pair it with eru, okra soup with shrimp and greens or ègúsí soup, and top with ọbẹ̀ onírù or any braised meat.

Now, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health have uncovered the biological reason behind this unusual pattern. Their findings, published in Science Advances, provide the first detailed explanation for why bird flu took such an unexpected form in cattle. The work could also help scientists better anticipate how H5N1 might behave if it spreads to new animal species in the future.

Bird Flu’s Unusual Appearance in Dairy Herds

The outbreak first emerged in dairy cattle in the Texas Panhandle, where animals developed severe cases of necrotising mastitis, a painful inflammatory disease that damages tissue in the mammary glands.

“Mastitis is a classic disease in milk-production animals, and veterinarians were dutifully looking to all the usual suspects for the source, like bacterial pathogens,” said senior author Suresh Kuchipudi, Ph.D., chair of infectious diseases and microbiology at Pitt Public Health. “When the real culprit turned out to be bird flu, everyone in the field was caught completely by surprise. We hadn’t even remotely considered that cattle could be a host for H5N1.”

Before the virus was identified, it spread from herd to herd, infecting cattle and contaminating their surroundings.

“If a cow is infected, it sheds a lot of virus into the milk,” said Kuchipudi. “This raised concerns about occupational risk for farm workers. Also, there is a habit of feeding raw milk to domestic pets, like cats, and there have been instances of cats dying, which we studied previously.”

Kuchipudi emphasised that pasteurisation effectively destroys the virus, highlighting the importance of avoiding raw milk.

Searching for the Biological Explanation

Throughout his career, Kuchipudi has studied influenza viruses, focusing on how receptor biology influences which species and tissues can be infected. Influenza viruses attach to specific receptors on cells in a lock-and-key fashion. These receptors belong to a group of sugar-based molecules known as glycans.

Earlier studies from other research groups suggested that flu-related glycan receptors were present in the noses, tracheas, and lungs of cattle. Yet cows infected with H5N1 were not developing the respiratory disease researchers expected.

That discrepancy suggested that a more detailed explanation was needed.

“Glycan biology is very complex,” said Kuchipudi. “We realised that, to understand what was really going on, we would need to use more innovative technologies and map out the fine-detailed architecture that enables the virus to bind to cells.”

To do that, Kuchipudi partnered with Harvard Medical School researcher Lauren E. Pepi, Ph.D., whose expertise is in glycomics, the comprehensive study of glycan structures.

Why H5N1 Targets Cow Udders

The research team combined multiple techniques, including binding experiments, staining approaches, and ultra-high-resolution imaging, to examine how H5N1 interacts with different tissues.

Their analysis showed that not all glycan receptors function the same way when it comes to bird flu infection. The virus was able to bind only to a specific subtype known as N-linked sialic acid receptors.

These receptors were found throughout the udder tissue of cattle but were nearly absent in airway tissue. According to Kuchipudi, this made the mammary glands a “perfect breeding ground for the virus”.

The discovery helps explain why H5N1 caused severe mastitis rather than respiratory illness in dairy cattle.

Predicting Bird Flu’s Next Move

The researchers believe their findings could do more than explain the cattle outbreak. The same approach may help scientists identify which animals and tissues are vulnerable to H5N1 before future outbreaks occur.

“We can preemptively screen different species and different tissues within them for susceptibility,” said Kuchipudi. “For example, would they exhibit respiratory symptoms? Would they show only mastitis, as in cows? Or would they show neurological disease, as our team has shown in cats? The lessons learned could potentially help prevent us from being caught by surprise again.”

Other authors on the study were Surabhi Srinivas, M.S.; Shubhada K. Chothe, Ph.D.; Santhamani Ramasamy, Ph.D.; Sougat Misra, Ph.D.; Noel Chandan Nallipogu, M.D., MPH; and Lindsey LaBella, all of Pitt; Yin-Ting Yeh, Ph.D., of Pennsylvania State University; May Wang, B.S., of Harvard University; and Heidi L. Pecoraro, Ph.D., and Brett T. Webb, Ph.D., of North Dakota State University.

This research was supported by Pitt Public Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (FP00039373/AWD00010780).