Mortars, Pestles and the Comfort of a Culinary Ritual

Few things yield texture and flavor — as well as connection — as affectingly as this kitchen tool, Yewande Komolafe writes.

There are family members we never get to meet, those whose absences are filled by the memories of the people who knew them. I never met my great-grandmother Osunfunke Thomas (nee Olatunji), but I’ve formed an image of her from the story of her passing, as told to me by my mother and her sisters. She was 76, and it happened quite suddenly, as she was crushing aromatics for dinner on a grinding stone.

This memory runs counter to even the few photographs I’ve seen of her. In them, she is slight, less sturdy than I had been led to believe. I may not have known her, or the precise details of her life, but I know of her indomitable spirit. And I know the grinding stone, called olo in Yoruba, that she was working with on that day in 1982 in Lagos, Nigeria. My grandparents saved it and used it in their home. And I think about it — and her — whenever I am working ingredients and extracting their essences in my mortar and pestle.

I have an array of devices that perform all of the functions of a good mortar and pestle. I grind five-pound bags of heirloom corn for ogi, a fermented breakfast corn porridge, in a food processor. I run nuts and seeds through a blender to make kunun gyada and other drinks. When I’m making a pepper soup blend from whole spices, I glance first at my mortar and pestle, and then to the spice mill next to it. I grab the mill probably 99 times out of 100.