culinary week addendum

It's been a while since I wrote about food, and I figured my readership was hungry for it (you see what I did there?)

It's not clear to me why some countries have good food and others don't. At first I linked it to poverty, but that makes no sense, since Ethiopia and Mexico are as poor as gravel farmers, and they are still cooking up some marvelous shit. To say nothing of American soul food. Meanwhile Tanzania is stuck in the twelfth century. Why? Even Mozambique has them beat by a country kilometro, and they're a full ten slots lower on the HDI tables. The subject is fit for the investigations of some erstwhile chef turned grad student, who will pioneer the field of historio-ethno-culinary-sociology, and for her troubles receive nothing less than a tenured chair at Harvard University, a MacArthur genius grant, and possibly a glowing profile in the New Yorker. That person, sadly, is not me: I can't even boil an egg.

The thing is, the raw ingredients are there. They just need a little tinkering. Forthwith, a list:

ugali
This is the staple, a tasteless, formless glop of boiled corn. No salt, no butter, no ghee, no nothing. I would say your average Tanzanian gets about 70% of his calories from this stuff. While Michael Pollan and all those butthurt white liberals in the West are whining about crystallized fructose in their Vitamin Waters and xantham gum in their Starbursts, Tanzanians are literally eating an enormous lump of boiled corn mash at every single meal. Not corn products, but actual corn. That's why it's called a staple food, mang.

mishkaki
Similar to shish kebab, but even that humble designation is overstating the case. What we have here is meat on a stick, a la the Minnesota state fair. You can pick between goat, chicken, beef or fish, with mild spice flavoring and little in the way of marination. If you're lucky you can find a place that mixes it up with a little ginger, or maybe some peri-peri (see below). If you're not lucky, you get a sad little lump of salt on the side of the plate. The meat is sourced from the halal butcher across the street; you can recognize his storefront by the crescent moon painted on the door, the cow head hanging in the window, and the airborne armada of flies crawling on the meat.

peri-peri
There are a lot of variations on this, but the closest familiar equivalent would be pico de gallo. Tomatoes, onions, and a little hot pepper. It's barely even spicy most of the time, and even if you do like I do, and put a heaping mound of the stuff on each of your mishkaki meat squares, you're still marooned on the 'mild' side of the Old El Paso capsaicin index. Sigh.

pilau
Spiced rice. Think biryani, which is really what it is. This is some good shit, true, but it's been boosted wholesale from India, so I can't really give Tanzania credit. Culinary plagiarism is a rich and noble tradition but usually you have to augment what you've stolen with some of your own ideas, like how the Italians took chow fun and turned it into squid-ink vermicelli topped with roast walnuts and shaved truffles (I just drooled a little.)

deep-fried changu
This overgrown guppy gets tossed in a vat with his brethren and deep-fried whole in some raw-ass palm oil. I give this, the most common form of the dish, a C-, but there are some variations. Sometimes it's drowned in tomato sauce instead. Sometimes it's boiled to paste in a stew. And recently I met some rasta dudes on the beach here who were doing a tempura variation coupled with a tasty tomato dipping sauce, and I think they're on to something. You might still choke on a bone, of course, but it's worth it to get to the fish cheeks (the best part, duh.) One love.

grilled octopus
No complaints here. Grilled octopus owns, but the only place you can get it is from the old ladies outside the fish market, who are cooking it over an open-pit fire stocked with handmade charcoal. A skewered toothpickful of the stuff costs 10 cents, so if you load 'em up between your knuckles you can turn yourself into a walking hors d'oeuvres tray for about two bucks. Then double-fist that shit into the plastic bucket of liquefied commercial-grade hot sauce next to the grill. The only drawback here is the breeze blowing in off the ocean, bringing with it the putrid odor of the fish market, which smells like death. Then again, it's an open-air fish market without refrigeration in the stinking heat of the equatorial sun. Th' fuck you expect it to smell like? Flowers?

senene
I thought they were prawns, at first, but it turns out they're some kind of locust. They're a seasonal delicacy, available only after the rainy season, when they block out the sky like a biblical plague. They're harvested in mosquito nets (or so I'm told), and then fried in grease and stuffed into plastic bags and sold from car-to-car along the highway. A bag should run you no more 25 US cents or the local equivalent, but I overpaid cause I liked the dude. As for the taste, well... you know that scene in Ratatouille where the food critic eats the ratatouille and is immediately transported back in time to his childhood and he's skinned his knee on his bike and then his mom is making the dish for him? And he's super happy? My first bite of senene was kinda like that, except instead of a memory of my mom making me dinner in the kitchen, it was a memory of Ethan Dean making me eat a handful of grass and dirt on the ballfield at Bryn Mawr Meadows on a dare. But greasier. Fuck senene.

roast chicken
OK, this is one thing that nobody can fuck up, but it's surprisingly hard to find. The best I've had so far was at a food stand outside the airport. The chicken is all halal, which means that there's a Muslim dude who sits there and slices the throats of hundreds of birds a day while mumbling thanks to Allah, the most merciful, the most high. This is real; I've actually met one of these guys. It seems to me like the definition of a shit job, but the dude was pretty happy, all things considered. Maybe he was happy to earn a living wage. Or maybe he had a naturally happy disposition. But I like to think he was actually on the next level, the level of total consciousness, the level of continuous spiritual communion with the divine, the level of "transcendental bliss through boredom" that we're all going to learn about in The Pale King this time next year. Inshallah.

chapati
We've covered this before on the blog, but just to reiterate, it's basically just a corn tortilla fried in grease. And that's fine on it's own, but it's also what's so frustrating about the whole thing. I mean, it's a tortilla, son! A fucking tortilla! Fold some mishkaki beef and some peri-peri and some chopped onions and some beans in there and you are looking at what we mzungus like to call a "burrito." A burrito, godammit! No, you're saying it wrong; trill the r's. There, you've got it! Brilliant! The African burrito! It'll transform the culinary landscape of the whole continent! Put some chicken in there! Or some octopus! Some tempura panfish! Throw in some senene if you want! You can post about it on chowhound and food snobs from across the world will charter jets to fly down to your little food stand and pay you 17 dollars for the privilege of eating fried bugs wrapped in corn! Joe Rogan will host! I gotta invent this shit for you? What am I, the Earl of Sandwich?


When I tell people I work in "development," this is what I'm talking about.