Cooking lessons

[the charcoal stoves we used to cook]

Here in a tiny village called Nahukahuka, with no power or running water, we are staying with two secondary schoolteachers in a modest 3-room mud house with concrete floors. They have been incredibly generous to us, giving us our own room with a bed. Outside is a pit latrine with a palm-leaf privacy enclosure (picture at the end). In return for the place to stay, we have promised to cook for them while we are here. There seem to be no real restaurants or even much street food in Nahukahuka, with the exception of a banana-seller and a guy who reheats chunks of fried cassava, so cooking every night is our only real option.

Because there is no electricity and no cooking gas, all cooking is done either with firewood or using charcoal (mkaa). Because firewood is readily available in the forest, poorer people tend to use firewood. Cooking with firewood is a smoky affair and women who have cooked with firewood their whole lives tend to develop red, permanently irritated eyes that sometimes earn them a reputation of being witches. These schoolteachers we are staying with are comparatively better off, and they use chunks of charcoal placed in a concrete bowl, with three metal prongs on top to support a pot. The basic premise is something like a cross between barbeque-ing and campfire cooking.

Yesterday we cooked ugali (the staple for lunch), rice (the staple for dinner), squash greens, and a river fish and vegetable stew in coconut milk (which I would have loved but for the godforsaken fish!).

Preparing ugali is almost exactly the same as making very thick grits. You boil a small amount of maize flour in water, and when the mixture boils and thickens, you beat it with a wooden spoon to break up all the lumps and cook the mixture through. If it’s not thick enough for your tastes, you add more flour along the way and continue beating. No salt, no pepper, no nothing – I told Irene how we eat grits in America with salt, pepper, and butter and she thought that sounded crazy. When it’s finished cooking, you turn the mass out onto a plate and toss it up in the air so it lands on each side, eventually rounding the stuff into a ball.

When I learned to cook rice as a girl, I learned to carefully rinse the rice, measure the rice and water exactly to get the right ratio, add a little salt, bring the mixture to a boil, and then simmer at a very low temperature, covered, for 20-40 minutes depending on the type of rice. Stirring and peeking were off-limits and a surefire recipe for sticky, gummy rice, and too high a simmering temperature was a direct route to rice that stuck to the bottom of the pot and never cooked through. In Tanzania, all these rules go out the window – but I guess the normal rules couldn’t apply if you were trying to cook rice on a campfire! (The whole process starts with a tedious picking through the rice by hand to remove any stones, weeds, or unhusked rice grains, done on a large plate-shaped basket called an ungo). You still rinse the rice, but because you’re cooking over high heat, you stir the mixture constantly with a small amount of water, then add a little more water just before fluffing it and pulling it off the high heat. Then you take the pot and set it on the ground on top of a few pieces of charcoal, and on top of the lid you set a few more pieces of charcoal, to provide heat on both sides. Over the course of about half an hour, the charcoal bakes the rice completely.

Squash greens are hairy little buggers, and so you start by cracking each stem and peeling it back so that the hairy membrane on the surface peels off, making them more tender and mouth-friendly. They are then washed to remove the ubiquitous sand, then shaved with a knife into very thin strips. These are cooked with water and a little salt until tender. Then, in another pot, you fry onion and tomato in oil until the vegetables soften, and add to the greens. Then you add coconut milk and salt and cook until most of the liquid evaporates. Coconut milk here is made from scratch using an X-shaped stool called an mbuzi (a word which oddly also means “goat”); sticking out from one end of this stool is a platypus-bill-shaped serrated tool, which you rub half a coconut against over a bowl until all the coconut meat is ground up. Then you add water to the coconut meat, and after it sits a few minutes, you squeeze the meat to extract the coconut milk, and discard the meat. The coconut milk is a fatty layer that sits on top of the milk, so you take care to pour only the coconut milk into the food, and discard the remaining milky water. Very labor intensive process, but it deshrouded the mystery of how we get the coconut milk that comes in a can!

The fish sauce was very simple – fry skinned tomatoes and onion in oil until they form a sauce, then add coconut milk, vegetables (okra and eggplant) and fish and simmer until the whole thing tastes desperately fishy.


[the outhouse/shower]

Cooking one meal can easily take more than 2 hours even with 2-3 people cooking. The funny thing is that once we finished cooking, I had absolutely no appetite… though reports from our schoolteachers indicate the food was tasty…