A Mississauga-based cookbook author has made food history, becoming the first Nigerian cookbook author to win a James Beard Foundation Award.
Ozoz Sokoh, the food writer and culinary anthropologist behind Kitchen Butterfly, won the 2026 Emerging Voice in Books award for her debut cookbook, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria. She accepted the award at the James Beard Media Awards in Chicago — a major moment for Nigerian food writing on the international stage.
The award recognizes first-time authors whose work has an immediate impact and lasting significance, and Chop Chop certainly goes beyond being a collection of recipes. Published by Artisan Books, the cookbook features 100 recipes from across Nigeria’s six geopolitical regions, pairing dishes with the history and food traditions behind them.
There’s plenty here for anyone already familiar with Nigerian cooking, including recipes for jollof rice, suya, egusi soup, pepper soup and puff puff, but Sokoh’s approach is also designed to bring readers who are new to the cuisine along for the ride. She pays close attention to the names and origins of ingredients and dishes, while using sensory descriptions and, where possible, substitutions to make recipes more accessible to home cooks.
Sokoh has been documenting Nigerian food culture for years. She launched her blog in 2009 and has built her work around researching and preserving African food history. Her background is somewhat unexpected: she spent 20 years as a geologist and describes her approach as “from geology to gastronomy.”
She began developing recipes while studying at university in Liverpool in 1998, but it was after moving to Canada in 2020 that she finally had the time to develop the cookbook project she had been considering for years. S
Chop Chop had already earned major recognition before its James Beard win, including being named a New York Times Best Cookbook of 2025 and receiving a gold Nautilus Book Award in the Food, Cooking and Healthy Eating category.
And Sokoh isn’t done researching. She’s currently working on a project tracing the history of jollof rice through recipes over a 100-year period, along with a project examining historic Nigerian menus.