travel stories – Culinary Anthropologist

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End of the road (for now)
15th January, 2009 5:09 pm Leave a Comment
Another day, another border crossing. More friendly and efficient people doing our paperwork with the minimum of fuss and a welcoming smile. We were used to this by now – but this one was different. This was the last border we’d cross – Ghana was the end of the trip. We were running late, too: due at our friends’ house on the coast for Christmas, and only a couple of days to get there.

We’d only come a couple of hours from Ouagadougou – but somehow crossing the border really did seem to change things. There were private cars on the roads, not just scooters and buses. Villages were full of modern-looking buildings made of cinder blocks and tin rather than mud and straw. People’s clothes were different – those Francophone West Africans really know how to dress. The bread was suddenly square, white and sliced rather than long, thin and pointy. And strangest of all, they seemed to be speaking some funny language we didn’t quite recognise – although it certainly did seem familiar …

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And the nominations are …
20th December, 2008 8:55 pm Leave a Comment
Ten minutes into Burkina Faso, and we knew it was going to be a dead cert for that most coveted of awards: Most Friendly Border Guards Anywhere Ever. The Malians will be disappointed, I know, after a very strong showing indeed, but the Burkinabés trumped them from their very first “Bienvenue!“. This is the way to welcome new arrivals to your country — friendly, enthusiastic, helpful, interested and generally very correct. UK Customs and Immigration could certainly stand to learn a thing or two …

And now that we’ve spent a (too too short) while here, that’s not the only award it’s been nominated for. It’s up for the hotly contested Chef Most Generous With His Time prize, is the bookie’s favourite for Most Surprising Yoghurt-Offal Combination, has several entries in the extremely competitive Tastiest Street Food category, and is way out in the lead in the (admittedly less competitive) Most Impressive Cross-Town Inter-Generational Search For An Obscure 70s Funk Album.

Let’s open those envelopes, and find out just what they won …

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My mate marmite
10th December, 2008 6:48 pm Leave a Comment
Our experiences crossing from Mauritania to Senegal had left us slightly wary of border officials, but that definitely changed when we crossed into Mali. On the Senegalese side, the police and customs were cheery, chatty and helpful (if quite hard to actually find). On the Malian side, they just invited us in for lunch.

A few kilometres of dusty plains covered with enormous baobab trees, and we found ourselves sitting outside a customs hut with three friendly douaniers, sharing their thiou and their thiep – a delicious meaty stew, and a tasty rice dish studded with vegetables, garlicky chilli paste and savoury hibiscus-leaf sauce. If all of Mali was like this, we thought, we’d probably get on OK.

And as it turned out, a great deal of it was. We spent a lot of time in Mali sharing food with people: cooking it with them in big bubbling marmites on charcoal fires; and then eating together, with everyone gathered round one big pot using their fingers. This is partly because we’re greedy, of course; but also because people here are so sociable. And because Tabaski was coming, and the rams were getting fat …

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Aminata pounding millet
6th December, 2008 6:32 pm Leave a Comment
Today in the Dogon village of Djiguibombo we learnt how to make tô – a kind of thick millet porridge which is pretty much the staple food in this part of Mali. We learnt from an expert: Aminata, who is 15 and has been making the tô for her whole family since her mother died some years ago. And we realised how hard work it is: you have to pound the millet into flour by hand in an enormous mortar & pestle. Just listen to how hard she hits it.

It’s worth listening to this using headphones or proper speakers – on laptop speakers you can’t really hear the bass sounds of the pounding properly.

Click here to listen.

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Balafon and djembe
3rd December, 2008 11:50 pm Leave a Comment
Went out drinking in Ségou this evening, and found a band (Groupe Pawari) playing in a bar. One guy with a balafon, one with a very loud djembe drum, and someone occasionally doing a bit of singing. Actually they all seemed to be able to play all the instruments – especially Issa.

We didn’t take any photos of the band, or the bar. So here’s one of the sunset instead.

Click here to listen.

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To the land where things ferment
26th November, 2008 7:20 pm 4 Comments
We rolled over the Diama dam and got all of about three feet into Senegal before having to make our first payment: the bridge toll. Although to give him credit, we did get a proper ticket and receipt – unlike the next person in line, the frontier policeman, who simply refused to stamp our passports until we gave him 10 euro each. Receipt? Of course not – everyone just pays up. Here, I’ll show you: look at my big drawer full of cash.

But as it turned out, he was the only person we came across in Senegal who wanted to do things that way. Contrary to popular traveller misconception, every other traffic policeman, customs official and gendarme was friendly and correct (if sometimes a little busy on their mobile phone to do much more than wave our paperwork in the air for a bit). And as in Morocco and Mauritania, pretty much everyone else we met was chatty and helpful too.

Other things really did seem to change, though, as soon as we’d crossed the Senegal river. The landscape was much greener, lusher; there were trees everywhere; and there were monkeys running across the road. The kettles were made of stripy plastic now. The people were all properly black and looked seriously West African – women in incredibly bright patterned fabrics carrying everything on their heads, boys in football kit practising madly for their lucrative futures in the Premiership. And the food was definitely different. Here, it was all about the fruit juices. The savoury condiments, the grains, the baguettes and the viennoiserie. And above all, the joys of fermentation …

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Insects and waterfalls
23rd November, 2008 1:38 pm Leave a Comment
While staying in Dandé, a village up on the cliff a few kilometres from the Guinean border, we took a walk to the next-door village, Afia, and a bunch of the local boys took us to take a look at their waterfall. This is the greenest, lushest part of Senegal, and the forest we walked through was full of the most intense, almost psychedelic, insect sounds I’ve heard. This is the sound of us walking through the forest, crossing a stream and getting to the waterfall.

Click here to listen.

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Fonio in the morning
9:02 am Leave a Comment
You wake up in the dark and look at the time – it’s only 5am! What could have woken you? You can hear insects chirping, and a cock crowing in the distance, but that’s not it. Then you hear low women’s voices, and the pounding – a deep, muffled, insistent sound. Drums? But why would people be drumming this early? Then you remember – it’s just breakfast …

This is Dandé, a little village up in the hills on the Senegalese side of the border with Guinea. People here mostly eat fonio, a grain with little round seeds which looks a bit like couscous, and usually gets steamed in a similar way. It was entirely wild until a few decades ago, and it’s very nutritious – but to get the little skins off you have to pound it in a large wooden mortar, with a huge pestle, for a long time. So the women and girls of the village get up very early every day to start pounding …

I love this recording – the way the rhythm keeps changing and sounds almost musical. But to listen to it, make sure you use headphones or proper speakers – on my laptop speakers it really doesn’t work (you can’t hear the deep bass sound of the pounding at all).

Click here to listen.

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Down through the desert
8th November, 2008 9:37 pm Leave a Comment
Now that we’d come down from the Anti Atlas, we were looking at a thousand kilometres of very flat, very dry country between us and Senegal. We were on the edge of the Sahara. Only the edge, mind you – we’re not stupid enough to drive through the middle. And how dry can it really be when you’re right next to the Atlantic?

Quite dry, as it turned out. And quite flat, for most of it. But that doesn’t mean there was nothing interesting to eat, of course. If you’re in the desert, by the ocean, presumably people will be eating camel, and oysters. Stands to reason. The fermented sea slugs were more of a surprise …

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Morocco part 2: muffins and cheddar
1st November, 2008 8:40 pm Leave a Comment
By the time we’d got over the highest part of the High Atlas, it had started to rain. As we came down through the plains towards Marrakesh, we noticed some of the little streams were starting to overflow, and fields starting to look really quite damp. Then we came round a corner and realised we weren’t going any further – rivers here can overrun bridges at a moment’s notice. Sadly, after turning round, we realised we weren’t going back either: the little overflowing streams of ten minutes ago had now become rivers overrunning bridges too. We could sit and wait, or take the advice of the strangely animated man standing out in the rain, and take the little unmarked road out into the middle of nowhere …

We were trying to get to Marrakesh to stay with a Moroccan family: Jean-jacques Gérard had arranged for us to stay with his in-laws, and we were excited to see what real Moroccan home cooking was like. They say that the best food here is in people’s homes, and we’d started to suspect that there was something in this. We’d realised that lots of the interesting stuff is done by women: this means it’s usually done at home – so you don’t come across it on the standard tourist trail.

For example, finding the women who know how to make couscous the old-fashioned way, rolling it by hand, had taken us quite a while (although we managed it in the end). Our new mission was to find the women who make warka …

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