Kin day 10--food

What have we eaten? I have starting eating whole balls of fufu at main meals. Fufu is growing on me. And in me. I am convinced it expands through the hours following a meal. Fufu is a mixture of manioc and corn flours, cooked unseasoned in water and stirred to the consistency of Play-doh. It is served in portion-sized balls, but they are usually very large and we visitors have been slicing off tiny portions. It is the staple, the basis for the rest of the meal. You pinch off a bit, knead it in your hand and punch it with your thumb into a flap for grabbing a bite of seasoned food.

For us--family meals must be much sparer--there is always fufu and rice, sometimes also potatoes or pasta with a little something in it. There is some kind of green vegetable, pondu (manioc leaves) or lenga-lenga (spinach-like). Usually also plantains fried in palm oil. Once we had tiny little eggplants. There is almost always fish, fresh or salted or both, fried crisp, as well as chicken or sometimes beef. Juiciness is not a prized characteristic of the meat and fish that is served but they are tasty. Dessert is fruit, oranges, tangerines, papayas or, a strange one several nights ago about the size of a small plum. You pop the hard shell open and eat the seedy, pulpy center, which looks like a tiny, oblong brain. It is sour-sweet with overtones of rot. I can’t remember the name, even in French. I’d never heard of it.

The sameness of the diet has not bored me so far. Why? At home I am used to eating something different every night. Perhaps in our quest for variety we are acknowledging that we have not yet found the right foods, the ones that will carry us through our life, the kind of foods, like pondu and fufu, that you can eat day after day after day, and that you sorely miss when you are away from home. When Nina asked Marie-Jeanne what she wants to do when she visits the US again next October she said she wants to cook fufu. I am missing nothing of my home food. What is my home food? It is something different every night. I am a good cook but I do not like anything I cook well enough to cook and eat it day after day.

The staple foods here are not easily made. No canned or frozen pondu can imitate the real thing, and there is not yet an instant fufu mix, or if there is, no one would use it so long as they had the time to make the real thing. The other day, chez Mama Chantal, the fufu was light and almost fluffy. How was it done? It requires real skill, and time. And there are many steps to making pondu, including pounding in a mortar. These are labor-intensive foods.

We have been having bread, fruit, and tea for breakfast, plus things like scrambled eggs, French fries, or fresh-roasted peanuts. The main meal is sometime in the afternoon. There may be just two meals or a light evening supper of something like spaghetti or oatmeal. I thought I might lose a little weight here but I don’t think so, especially since we are driven everywhere. Maybe I should help pound the pondu.