Over the next three months, electricity came on a couple of hours a day or not at all. We learned to go to bed at dusk and rise with the sun. We also learned to read by candlelight. We took turns, one reading aloud to the other two. If Lincoln had done it, Thomas reasoned, then why couldn’t we?
Preparing meals was another problem; one that, in retrospect, taught me a great deal about how to be both resilient and creative when cooking. The electric range, of course, was useless. Simon bought us a small, locally made charcoal stove (a cylinder of tin), and every morning he came from his village with a bag of charcoal and twigs and lit a fire for our breakfast, repeating this indispensable service at lunch and dinner. I tried to replicate his actions several times, but had no luck lighting the stove.
What to cook? Every day Dodoma’s Central Square had a market. Farmers would come from around Dodoma, but there was very little to buy. Vendors squatted on the dusty ground in front of their produce: a few piles of eggplant (three to a pile); tomatoes, again three to a pile; tiny, sweet mangoes; cherimoyas; and dried fish (infested with flies) from the river. Then there were mountains of ugali, the maize that Tanzanians cooked like polenta; there were also tiny potatoes; these turned out to be delicious. What I needed most was oil, butter, and especially bread. There was one baker in town, a Greek who had lived in Dodoma for forty years. Every day, as I entered the store, he would say, “None today. Tomorrow there’ll be bread. No problem.” We went days at a time without bread. Chickens were small and sold live. If I wanted one, I had to kill it myself. One day I gave in, bought a chicken, and took it home, holding the squirming bird by its feet. I went out to the back yard, called Thomas for moral support, and cut its neck with my one sharp knife by holding its body between my knees. I screamed like a wounded animal as I did the deed. Then I had to eviscerate it! All my years of cooking hadn’t prepared me for this. How do you pluck a chicken without pulling off all the skin with the feathers? I should have brought the Joy of Cooking with me; it would have helped, I’m sure. I felt like a pioneer’s wife who had not married into her own class. And I rather enjoyed the disgusting romance of it!
That night we ate dry, skinless, grilled chicken, but it was better than another can of sardines. We hadn’t had meat in almost a week. There was a butcher on the square, of course. But his chunks—I wondered if he’d torn them off—of goat and beef were plagued with buzzing flies and hung drearily in rows on metal hooks. When I asked for a pound, I got half a pound of meat along with another half pound of fat, gristle, and bone. An expatriate neighbor, a bird-like English woman, advised me that if I cooked the meat until it was overdone, the flies didn’t matter. But I just could not make myself buy this meat again.
For the next few days, we survived on eggs, but our life changed when I was told about the Saturday Market. It was located near the slaughterhouse on a dusty plain near a small creek outside of Dodoma. It was a market where the Masai brought their lambs, goats, and calves to be slaughtered. Crouching in the dirt were women selling brilliantly colored cloth that they wrapped around their bodies, sometimes even over cotton, American-style dresses. There were stands for wooden bowls; dark, glossy shepherds’ clubs carved from single branches of a tree; enameled cooking utensils; and flat leather thongs. But most of all, Saturday Market was for live and butchered goats, sheep, and cattle from the slaughterhouse. The very first Saturday I visited the market, I made an ally in Philip, a short wiry young butcher who sold small goats from a wooden stand. For a few minutes, I watched him cutting up goats with a machete-like knife, like the butchers at the daily market in Dodoma’s Central Square. Suddenly I had an idea. I proposed a plan that would benefit us both: I’d teach him how to butcher the goats the European way, and he would gain expatriate clients willing to pay a much higher price for the meat. Philip agreed and told me to meet him the next day. As I drove our dusty white Peugeot station wagon (a vehicle ubiquitous in East Africa) to the slaughterhouse, I hoped that I really knew how to carve a goat. After all, I was French and remembered the proper French cuts of lamb and beef. Furthermore, I had often cut up chickens or deboned a duck. I also remembered the diagram of a cow with the different pieces of meat so well-defined in Fanny Farmer’s cookbook. Could butchering a goat be very much different? To the rear of Philip’s stand, I found a whole goat splayed on the table. Philip handed me a machete with a long, curved, menacing blade. I told Philip that I would guide him, but that he would have to do the cutting himself. The lessons began.
“First,” I said, “cut the goat in half lengthwise, following the backbone.” This exposed the liver, which I pulled out still warm, my hand shaking. I then told him to remove the entrails. Hoping not to feel too sick, I turned away while he did that. I looked for the kidneys and wasn’t very sure where they were, but once he removed the entrails, I saw them and knew that the European expatriates, especially the British, would love them and told Philip that. Then I carefully showed him how to carve the leg (it would be delicious broiled), and the small chops from the upper ribs. I was speaking to him as if in a trance, allowing instinct to guide me. Philip seemed to transform himself almost spiritually into a butcher-artist. He went at the shoulder with intense focus while he listened to my directions to cut the meat into even cubes for stew and showed professional pleasure as he carved out the small, tender-looking filet. We cut up two goats that day. As I left, I reminded him to keep the filet and the liver for me, which I’d promised to buy each Saturday. I also promised that if he butchered the goat the new way from now on, I would tell all the expatriates in town to buy exclusively from him. Back home, I marinated the filet in lime juice, thyme, and local pepper and broiled it on our charcoal stove. We ate tender roasted goat with small potatoes. It was the best home dinner we had had in weeks. The next day I invited Jimmy’s team to dinner, and, after marinating the liver in vinegar, lime juice, and a small green leaf that tasted like lemon that I found in the market (to this day, I don’t know what it was), I broiled it and served it with onions and tomatoes.
The next day, as I had promised Philip, I went visiting. Obliged to drink endless cups of tea and nibble on stale biscuits after I knocked on each expatriate’s door, I managed to notify most of our neighborhood about Philip’s specially butchered meat. The following Saturday, I arrived at the market and saw an actual line of people waiting to be served at Philip’s stall. When he saw me smiling, he winked and handed me a package. “For you,” he said. “No money…every week, come.”
My next task was to solve the bread problem. I thought I could make bread myself, but I had no oven. Could I make pita on hot stones like I had seen Arabs do in Egyptian villages? But I had no recipe for Arab bread. A few days later, I met a young Swiss engineer who was in Dodoma to teach Tanzanians to use solar power for cooking instead of charcoal. Tanzania’s forests had been decimated over the years, and a reforestation effort had begun. However, Tanzanians were used to cooking with charcoal, and the health of these sparse forests was being threatened.
When I mentioned that I was trying to bake bread, he proposed to make me a solar oven. A few days later, he came over with what looked like a long tube of metal lined with foil and topped with a piece of glass. All I had to do, he explained, was to place the bread on the foil, close the glass oven door, and stick the whole contraption in the sun. Great, I thought, but I didn’t have any idea how to make the dough! A couple from Australia lived next door who had once lived in the Outback. I decided to ask Mary, the wife—a suntanned, lined woman of fifty—for a recipe. She complied and threw in a couple of packets of yeast along with a well-worn paperback cookbook detailing the basics of Australian-style bread. Once I mixed all the ingredients, Thomas kneaded it with a vengeance. It not only rose, but nearly exploded out of my wooden bowl. We shaped the dough into two baguettes, stuck them in the tubular oven, and perched it on a flat rock in the sun. Thomas squatted right by it and waited, staring through the glass. It took two hours for those loaves to bake, and they came out dense and a
bit chewy, but we had succeeded nonetheless. From that day on, we baked bread once a week. We played around with the recipe, and the loaves improved over time…but only slightly.
Every morning Thomas and I took a walk through the town, going from store to store, trying to find things to cook. Indian Sikhs owned most of the shops, as well as ran construction companies and exchanged currency with the expatriate community. These shops were invariably dimly lit and sparsely stocked. You might find aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, makeup, toilet paper, potatoes, and the Tanzanian staple ugali. One day, as we entered one of the stores whose owner Jimmy knew quite well, I saw a woman leaving with a basket filled with vegetables. I asked the young Indian woman wearing a summer-weight sari that always stood patiently behind the counter if I, too, could have some fresh vegetables. Selma paused and looked at me with curiosity in her face. “Do you have any makeup to sell?” she asked in a whisper. I remembered all the makeup I had bought in New York. “Yes,” I said. “I do.” She asked me to bring it to her the next day, assuring me that she’d sell me some vegetables. That night, after I told Jimmy about my encounter, he told me that the Sikhs ran a clandestine bus from Dodoma over the Kenyan border because Nyerere had officially closed the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Tanzania had magnificent game parks, but most tourists went to Kenya, which had a more sophisticated tourist industry. The Kenyans would bring the tourists across the border to access Tanzanian parks and pocket the fees. This clandestine bus was a great moneymaking scheme for the Sikhs, who sold the vegetables they brought back from Kenya at a premium price or in exchange for things the young Indian women could not get in Dodoma. The next day, I brought the list of vegetables I wanted along with a large selection of American drugstore eye makeup and one of my larger baskets. Selma told me to come back in two days to collect my vegetables. Two days later, Selma handed me my basket. It contained vegetables I hadn’t asked for, but which I was content with: a cauliflower, overgrown zucchini, and a large head of lettuce. We hadn’t had a green salad in nearly a month! Every week from then on, I went back to Selma with eye makeup, blushes, and creams in exchange for more produce. I later befriended Selma and often went to the store to chat with her. She had wanted to be a teacher, but here in Dodoma, her life was very restricted, and the only thing she could do was study by correspondence, which took a long time. “I will have to get married soon,” she said. “I am twenty, and my father will find me a husband, and I will not be able to continue to study.” Sikh women went to temple in groups and met, once married, at one another’s house. I was the first friend that Selma had who was not a Sikh.
A few weeks later, Selma told me that her cousin was getting married; she wondered if I could make something for the dinner her parents were having for the fiancé’s family…something French, she mused. I thought about the liver Philip was giving me every week. Maybe I could make a liver pâté. It turned out that she had a large charcoal oven at home, so I prepared the ingredients for the pâté, assembled it, and took it to her house. We placed it the oven and prayed for the best. Forty minutes later, the pâté looked as if I had cooked it in my own oven in New York. It was a great success at the pre-wedding dinner, and I was in business. I made two to three pâtés a week in exchange for vegetables and fruit. Bartering had become my way of life.
I made very few friends among the expatriates, who let it be known that they didn’t quite approve of my friendships with Tanzanians and Sikhs. They tended to avoid me because I often talked about my new Tanzanian friends and their children. There were a few exceptions, including a couple from Holland who had lived in Dodoma for many years. Margaret, the wife, was an excellent cook and gardener who produced strawberries, spinach, string beans, and radishes and had the best papaya trees in Dodoma. They also had a wonderful garden of local plants and had parrots and even a small monkey. Thomas and I would often visit them for afternoon tea. I think Thomas had a crush on their daughter, Elisabeth, and I loved Margaret’s pancakes. Small, thin, and round, they were a cross between a crêpe and an American pancake. She served them with stewed strawberries from her garden. Thomas and I would wolf down at least six at each sitting. She also taught me to have no fear of garden snakes; we had several in our own garden. Her husband, Gustaf, worked for the government. He was a geologist and was teaching the Tanzanians to find and mine Tanzanite, a sparkling diamond-like stone that, when heated, turns a magnificent purple. Another couple I befriended was Jimmy’s Habitat boss and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Kidhane Alamayehu were Ethiopian and had also lived in Dodoma for several years. Mrs. Alamayehu came often to visit, dressed in pale colored gowns with flowing scarves around her shoulders. She cooked well, serving us spicy chopped beef in a red-hot sauce and vegetables in a green, spicy sauce with injira, a flat, soft, pancake-like bread prepared with fermented flour. Her table was always beautifully laid out with exotic flowers and silver cutlery. She also prepared some French dishes. She loved hard-boiled eggs in aspic or served with a mayonnaise or French grated carrot salad. We sat on low stools and ate with our hands, using the bread to pick up the meat or the sauce. I often wondered where she got these wonderful ingredients, but her husband was Jimmy’s boss, and I never dared ask. Often when she visited me, she would sit and question me about America, New York, and French recipes.
Among the expatriates were Italians, Danes, and a large colony of Chinese who ran the local hospital. They would nod when I’d see them in town, but they never spoke to us. I would meet one of them soon enough, when I was bitten on my heel by an insect. It hurt a lot and quite soon my heel became swollen, and I knew I had to remove the stinger. Thomas and I drove to the Chinese hospital, a white-washed building with benches all around the entrance, teeming with Tanzanians who had some ailment or other, often malaria or the flu, which that much later we learned was not flu but AIDS; the epidemic would soon ravage Tanzania and most of the rest of the continent. Because we were foreigners, we were immediately taken to the Chinese doctor. I explained what had happened as I looked around the dirty, fly-swarmed office. Would I lose my foot from the sting, or would I lose it from an infection because of the dirt around me? The doctor seemed to read my mind and said, “Go home, open the wound with a clean, sharp knife, and remove the sting. Wash it with alcohol, and take these pills. Antibiotics.”
When we got home, I burned the blade of a Swiss Army knife and looked at Thomas. Could I really ask Thomas to cut my heel open? Thomas was only twelve, but in the last few months, our relationship had changed. He was today more my friend than my son. I had taken him everywhere with me as he spoke Swahili better than I did and could converse with people. I discussed my plans with him and often asked his advice. At night, as we could not leave him alone in the house, he came with us as we socialized. Also, when we read to one another, the books were those we or he wanted to read. Thomas started to discuss books with us, which he had never done before.
I looked in his large blue-gray eyes and asked, “Can you cut my heel and remove the sting?” Thomas seemed quite confident that he could perform the operation. We poured alcohol on the wound, cut the skin, removed the sting, applied antibiotic ointment and a bandage, and hoped for the best. A few days later my wound was closed.
Another month had gone by, and a routine set in. Jimmy left the house very early in the morning and came home for lunch, then would return to the office while Thomas and I would explore our surroundings. Jimmy would return by five, often with his team. In New York, there had been an almost total separation between Jimmy’s office and home. Here in Dodoma, drawings of the new capital were pinned to the wall, and often his associates, tired of eating badly, would come and share our dinner. They discussed the plans or the problems they had with the authorities. Thomas listened and sometimes contributed to the talk because he now knew the city quite well. Thomas had quite a number of Tanzanian friends, was often invited to their houses, and was aware of how they lived.
In the afternoon, while Thomas was away with his friends, I had nothing much
to do, so one day I decided that I would write a new cookbook with recipes that I had dreamt of while cooking with whatever I had found in the market. Mainly, I wanted to write a diet book because Jimmy and Thomas had lost weight, but I hadn’t. I had stopped smoking and was wolfing down roasted peanuts all day long.
On a large piece of translucent yellow drafting paper, I wrote a list of vegetables that were not available in the Dodoma market, then a list of meats, and another of seafood I knew. I began to mix and match new, simple recipes and wrote them down on an old typewriter I borrowed from Kahama’s office. Very soon I had a long list of recipes but had to wait until I went back to New York to test them. A year later, Colette’s Slim Cuisine came out. The book was illustrated with Jimmy’s drawings of city scenes made out of vegetables, meat, fish, and pasta. The press was kind, the public was not. Could you really lose weight with such scrumptious recipes scoffed one of the reviews in the newspaper? One could; I was the living proof. But judging by sales, few believed me.
Back in Dodoma, August was approaching, and so was Jimmy’s birthday. What could Thomas and I give him? There was little to buy in Dodoma, and the roads to Dar es Salaam were flooded. On one of our walking expeditions, we discovered a local stadium where the Tanzanians played soccer. All around the stadium were small ivory shops selling creamy white ivory bracelets, necklaces, and rings that were laid out on black cloth. I asked one of the merchants if he could make a piece of ivory jewelry if I gave him a design. “No problem,” he said. I wasn’t convinced, but I decided to take the risk. I asked John Diebboll, Jimmy’s young assistant, to secretly give me a sketch of the plan of the new capital, and I asked the ivory dealer to carve the design onto a piece of ivory. “No problem! Come in three days; it will be ready.” He told me that it would cost me 100 shillings. I took out my little calculator to see how much it was in dollars. As the man saw it, he said, “Nothing! You give me the calculator, and I give you the carving.” An incredible deal! My bartering was at its peak. On the day of Jimmy’s birthday, I invited his team and a few of our friends. I handed Jimmy the carving, wrapped up just as the carver had given to me, in a piece of rough black cloth. I was as surprised as Jimmy when he opened it: A large concave piece of ivory was carved on one side with a perfect outline of the future center of the capital. He had tears in his eyes when he said, “It is the best birthday present I ever got!”
The World in My Kitchen Page 15
