Chili

Cuisine is so often a topic of conversation these days, stimulated largely by cooking-related television programmes – on and on they go, bla, bla, bla. Maybe that’s why I have often been asked what my favourite Tanzanian dish was. I find it difficult to give a straight answer, for example, high up on the rain shadow side of Mt. Meru, a woman fried an egg for me, and she flipped it over so it was moderately hard. That egg, that day, certainly hit the spot for me! But there are several dishes that for reasons of frugality, are reserved for special occasions and for western people, cooked green bananas might seem strange. Stews which comprise bananas much like dumplings, are among my favourites.  The staple, especially in rural areas, ugali is simply maize flour with a little salt added, mixed slowly into boiling water to make a stiff porridge. Bland of taste perhaps, and good or bad, depending who cooks it, Tanzanians living here in New Zealand yearn to have some good ugali with mchicha a bitter spinach.  

For a Sunday lunch Vai taught me to cook red kidney beans and rice. Her late mother had showed me that rice is never just plain rice. Like a good wine, good rice is grown in good soils and the best locally for us was from Magugu. Many times I accompanied Mama into the rice market, and although it was labelled Magugu, she still felt it and smelled it in case it was stale. The downside was there were stone chips in Magugu rice, so someone needed to pick through it – a job for the girls.

We didn’t use those new-fangled rice cookers, I preferred a double boiler. Oil and salt added to the boiling water first and when the rice was nearly ready, I tipped it into the top pot of the double boiler to finish it off with steam. We soaked the dry, red kidney beans the night before – there are toxins in the colour that can cause stomach ulcers so we removed those by draining off the red water and rinsing. Canned red kidney beans are ok too if there are no dry ones. Anyway, first brown an onion in the pot. Because the beans have been soaked, they will cook fairly quickly. Into the pot of browed onions the beans go with enough clean water to cover them. Add a small can of tomato paste concentrate. The paste is strong and tart. Once the beans are soft, they are piled atop a bed of rice. Simple.

Sometimes I added a little chili powder. Not much, just enough to give it a bite, even so, I found it took away the subtle flavour of the rice. As a matter of fact, I never had to buy chili powder. Locals used fresh chilies all the time and plenty were available in the markets but at the end of the road was a farm that produced vegetable seed. They grew a lot of chillies of various breeds and dried them for seed extraction. When I asked, they allowed me to take the residue free of charge because by adding a mixture of the powder, a little cooking oil and liquid soap to a bucket of water it was effective as a control for the termites that attack tree seedlings. The plant takes up the hot stuff and termites don’t like it. I used to take the mixture out to rural schools to protect their tree plantings. Never breathe in the dust though! It clears the sinuses and tubes in your head a little too well! Anyway, from time to time I used the dust-cum-powder in my cooking.

But y’know, I have noticed there is this thing about chili and its use in traditional foods outside their country of origin. There’s a sort of bravado and puffing-of-chest attitude where folk will say they can eat the really hot stuff without any effect! Ok some school girls who passed the fence surrounding my nursery, used to pick stinging nettle to test who could put up with the nettle on their upper lip for the longest time. Sure they could withstand it, but that didn’t mean they enjoyed it! The bravado with chili and other hot spices seems to me to be a bit similar. Your senses become numbed by the chili, so my question is, can they actually taste the food? Does the heat spoil the enjoyment of the actual food? I know for some it does, on the other hand, some get a perverse joy from pain – akin to self-flagellation. If you have to use yoghurt or juices to mitigate the heat, isn’t there something wrong with the food?

Before we had a refrigerator, my mother used to rub pepper into any meat that was not fresh to mask the taste of sour, perhaps even green meat! Cooks did the same thing on sailing ships, she told me one day as I watched her rubbing the stuff in. I find if I roast or fry meat in some nice clean fat or oil, the cooked meat is succulent and tastes like the meat-type it is. But if you add those strong spices or chili, I for one can’t actually taste the meat! And yes, yes, I’ve heard that leaving the bone on meat is supposed to make the meat sweeter, but in my experience, that too is pie in the sky!

  

Similar to what my mum did, traditionally, where these spices were used, there were no refrigerators, so meat had a very short fresh-life. Ancient peoples found that those hot spices contain compounds that help to mitigate the pathogens that meat will quickly pick up in the hot and sometimes humid climates - especially if the meat is dead hen or dead pig! So of course the hot spices protected the health of the consumer.

So there we are, just one of those little conundrums that from time to time sparks those cogs between my ears into action.