Food, Glorious Food.
- Details
- Written October 2020
Camp cooking had to start with looking for firewood, then practising our tenderfoot skills with an axe before carefully opening the tin of bully-beef for the goulash stew, accompanied by dough wound round a green stick to be baked as a damper. Then it would be a baked apple and over-stewed tea. Perhaps that prepared me for eating whatever was put in front of me, and learning to enjoy it.
But I hadn’t always enjoyed my food. I clearly remember a seven-year old sitting with what he thought was overcooked fish one lunch time, refusing to swallow it, and being forbidden to spit it out. It had plenty of ptyalin with it as it went down eventually, to be digested in the twists and turns of an inside that I was only to discover in the anatomy lab in later years.
Our early married years were in the doctors’ bungalow at Groote Schuur, where lunchtime dining room conversation included discussion on the latest surgical intervention we’d been entrusted with. Margaret got used to hearing about hernias and appendices in time. But then it was the canteen at the Denmark Hill Salvation Army training college. Two fish fingers on a large plate and the rather bland English diet didn’t appeal to a South African couple who’d grown up in the rich variety of cuisine drawn from Europe, Asia and Africa.
I relished nsima, the stiffly cooked maize meal of our Zambian days. Margaret never took to that. And eating with fingers was certainly not for her. I tried to adhere to the courtesies of knowing when to take from the dishes from the centre of the table. If ever there was a pecking order, here was it. Maize or millet were generally the staple, but the mildly toxic cassava was available should it be available in a dry season. One year, shortly after the construction of Kariba, some of the people who’d had to be relocated in the Zambezi valley, and unfamiliar with the flora and vegetation of their new location, mistook a poisonous root for cassava. Dozens died.
People in ‘the valley’ were familiar with hunger and malnutrition. Goats roamed freely, often devastating crops. I had a brain-wave. Why don’t we truck maize down, and bring goats up. I even planned a small abattoir. Government officials supported the idea. Oxfam sent a representative to a meeting planned for a Saturday morning. We waited and waited, but nobody turned up. ‘I suspect it’s their way of politely saying no thank you,’ remarked the man from Oxfam, with a good Oxford accent. ‘And anyhow, I see their seed millet hanging up in the huts, ready for planting. Really hungry people would have eaten that.’ No truck, no goats, no abattoir. But another lesson learned.
Fingers were also the order of the day as we travelled through central India, mainly in Andhra Pradesh. Our hosts ensured that the curries were never too hot. Chapattis or rice: we learned to pass or flick them into the mouth without touching the lips. We would know we’d had a good curry for days thereafter, not only as the spices found their way through the digestive track, but with the lingering smell on fingers, however hard you scrubbed.
My international travel in the 80s had introduced me to a wide variety of delicious foods. For example:
- British Columbian salmon in a revolving restaurant above Calgary (the first of many visits across Canada where I could tell them about Salvation Army health services, but learned much more from Salvation Army hospital administrators);
- tempura eaten with wooden chopsticks sitting on a tatami floor in Tokyo (my visit to share in decisions that led to a shift from tuberculosis to palliative care);
- an evening meal in Begoro, Ghana, with snails bought at the roadside that afternoon (a visit to encourage staff and help them accept the inevitable move from expatriate missionary to national professionals);
- lunch with a Bolivian family, where due to the low boiling point at high altitude, potatoes have to be partially ‘cooked’ by storing them in rivers that freeze through the winter (In La Paz and Cochabamba to help integrate a Salvation Army hospital with the local university and encourage greater community involvement by both).
Sometimes as we rise from the table we might say something like: ‘Ah, that was good - thank you.’ Or in the words of the New Testament Emmaus story: ‘Did not our hearts burn within us.’ Or these days, it might simply be, ‘It was good to be together.’ We long for the days when we might be able to get together again for breakfast. Don’t forget: it’ll still be Boy Scout cooking.
But now it’s nearly time for lunch. I need to get it ready: bread and soup today.
October 2020