Malian food is, for the most part, fairly simple. For a square meal, a starchy paste and a leafy sauce will usually suffice. However, Malians are very much aware of the awesomeness of snacks, which are much more varied and exciting than a home-cooked meal. I am never more than fifty feet away from someone selling peanuts, bananas (fresh or deep-fried), beans, or any deep-fried potato puffs. These roadside banana stands and snack bars are deliciously mixed and matched, although most Malians prefer to eat plainly at home. Every market stall sells eggplants, but I have never come across any evidence that indicates that anyone eats them. Food, in a country where there is not enough to go around, even as the majority of the population are either farmers or food vendors, is a complicated subject, and it's been a month’s struggle to try put it into some sort of dimly intelligible perspective. Here goes.
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| Yes, the picture was taken before I ate this fancy feast. And it was delicious |
There is a restaurant on the Catalan coast, about two hours from Barcelona, that will put an atomizer in your mouth and dose your tongue with a vaporized martini. It will be followed up with a few dozen other courses that systematically deconstruct the culinary world into its constituent possibilities and recombine them as they see fit. They serve up things like Parmigiano-Reggiano foam, a mercurial dessert that disappears as it touches the tongue, leaving no trace of substance, only taste. Called El Bulli, it is restaurant powered by both a kitchen that is more like a lab, and its ever-advancing forays into the unexplored have ossified it as the best restaurant in the world, according to, well, everybody. Sadly, neither you nor I will never eat there. Even if it weren’t closing after the 2011 season, in order to get one of the 8000 spots available each year, you have to enter a lottery along with two million others and hope for the best. This success was powered by the molecular gastronomy movement that began in the 80s, the first time people began seeing food as a valid scientific enterprise that turned a soufflé into a product of physics and biochemistry rather than procedure and rote.
Food science is new to the home kitchen but is in some ways is all growed up, having spent most of its life in the service of industry. Before we got all post-modern and individualistic about our gelées, James Kraft discovered a way to process cheese so it didn’t need refrigeration, which, combined with the need for such a product created by the First World War, set Kraft on its way to becoming the food behemoth it is today. In our Industrial and efficient Interstate-powered heyday Foods needed science in order to be standardized, created on an assembly line, preserved, stored and shipped across the continent. Chemists figured out how to make mayo that won’t split, milk that won’t spoil and sugar pellets from heaven that melt in your mouth but not in your hand.
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| The yellow one is played by Richard Feynman |
Before food was science, it was ritual. As scribes like Escoffier codified oral traditions, the ceremonial, languid simmer of a Bolognese, the secret caves that made the best brie, and the proper way to brew a lager all left the realm of a specialized cadre and became common cultural currency. As important as preparation was, the practice of eating was no less ritualistic. Food was, and in many places still is, not the focus of a meal but just an excuse to bring family and friends together. Bread was not broken for its own sake, it was only to bring like-minded people together to discuss common goals and good works. The contents of a communal pot, like baseball games and karaoke nights, are hardly worthwhile in and of themselves, but provide a good reason for people to come together and rib each other. You gathered around a fire to decompress after a hard day of eking out a living, to gird yourself and your family against the next day, and to be happy for the food, not because it is sublime, but because it is sufficient.
Of course, subtly interwoven into this slow transition from tradition to modernity was global commerce and an important few centuries of politics. The discovery of America, it is said, was the single most important thing to happen to food, ever. Cows and pigs went from Europe to Mexico and became carnitas, while various New World products fertilized a staggering array of global cuisines. Tomatoes and eggplants left Peru appeared for the first time in Italy and France, potatoes took became ubiquitous in Ireland, peanuts were sent from Paraguay to Africa and Southeast Asia, and hot peppers became staples in India and China. Food, as it turns out, is not a terrible way to trace the movements of people, money and ideas across time and space.
A typical Malian home-cooked meal falls very much into the category of the traditional category, not nearly as much a taste sensation as a joint venture in the prolongation of life and strengthening of community bonds. The food that is available in most of Mali is whatever you can grow, or whatever you’re willing to pay dearly for someone to bring across the Sahara for you. Italy’s cuisine flourished as its cities became trading hubs and Renaissance metropolises, Mali’s towns and villages have remained more or less isolated, and its foods have remained simple. However, the meal I sat down to eat would be explained just as well by the way it is served as by the food it provides. In that sense, I have yet to participate in a typical Malian meal, because I do not really exist within a Malian family, and the family-community continuum is everything. I have, however, attended as a visitor, and nominally taken part in the goings-on. Both Lauren and I were given Malian names, lifted directly from other members of the family who immediately came to mind. I was named, Adama Traore, after the guy who was on his way home from work. Lauren was named, following some dispute, after Adama’s wife, Fatima Sidibe.
The food is served in a large metal bowl, all members of the family cluster around on the floor and reach into the bowl with only their right hands, because the left hand, in any Muslim country, is a sinister asswipe. Hands scoop food into mouths, and people talk about their day and about the Joneses. The rabbit-eared TV, if the family has one and if power stays on for 10 minutes at a time, is showing the soccer game, but shockingly, people are indifferent. They eat with their backs to the TV – truly, this is a strange land. Fatima-Lauren and I were lucky enough to have rice with yassa, an onion stew with tasty chunks of meat in it, a rare treat brought to us by Maimuna's splurging. There are a few other options, like rice instead of toh, peanut sauce or fish paste instead of leaf sauce. More often, the bowl is filled with toh¸ a millet or corn-based goop. It is usually covered in “leaf sauce”, a green glaze that comes from a nameless leaf that some people say is baobab, but is almost certainly not.
It's nice to happily discuss the focus on the immaterial, the family unit rather than the taste sensation, but this is as much the product of a communal culture as of poverty, where the decadence of new recipes, odd ingredients and long-simmered adventures are distracting, costly and absurd in a setting where primary purpose of a meal is socializing and the secondary purpose is not starving. Of course, not all Africans live on the precipice of starvation, some are in fact quite rich, easily able to afford an American Hamburger, a pizza, or a Malian lamb stew. However, the home-cooked meals in rich households are conducted essentially the same way, the major differences being the volume and frequency of meat.
One of the things that piqued my curiosity before embarking on this trip was exactly what the food would be like. Whether the great Malian empire that controlled Saharan trade would provide food infused with dates, cardamom and sumac. Whether the French colonists had impressed upon their subjects their own culinary dogma. Like Moroccan food, but different, and a secret. I would never be so bold as to expect a country full of ripening cheeses and kalamata tapenades on every slice of bread, but a country that ate stews with aromatic Saharan spices and used of hands as cutlery, married with the exacting methodology of French haute cuisine, that would surely be a country after my own heart. I set my hopes high and me expectations somewhat lower, and prepared for the trip delighting at the possibilities, how they would fold so wonderfully into my bobble-headed liberal view of the unending bounties of cultural exchange. In that light, the homecooked dinner is a little dispiriting - The fusion of Saharan and French didn’t really ever seem to take root. Sure the onion sauce had a bay leaf in it, but it was still very much on one side of the tracks.
Out on the busy streets, the dynamic avenues of exchange, things are different. If you buy your food on the street corner, you're probably not sitting down to eat it with your family, so the communal focus disappears. At the same time, competition for your francs creates an atmosphere that tends to push product evolution. As a result, some of the street vendors have come up with fascinating meal ideas. I recently discovered the local dame of street food, a woman serving no less than 6 different meals on just a benchtop with a charcoal burner and a wok, all served with a chunk of fresh, bakery-warm baguette. In addition to the fried fish, fried bananas, oeuf surprise (a scotch egg, Malian style) and salad, she has a delightful beef dish, the highlight of which is the sauce. I don’t know exactly what was in it, but I know that the quantity of oil she added should automatically qualify her for US citizenship. The oil was in a yellow jerry-can, which means she buys it in 20 liter increments. She unscrews the lid and adds few generous glugs to my food and a few more directly into my vena cava, and off I go, contented.
At the many other street vendors, you can get a number of little compromises between French and Malian food. The fresh fruit and vegetables sold at every market stall are straight out of a Parisian kitchen. Onions, celery, carrots, eggplant, tomatoes and green peppers, some of them turning up in the beef stew. Yogurt is popular, though sold as dege, a mixture of equal parts yogurt and millet, served in a plastic Coke bottle. At a low-rent restaurant, you can order a Capitane cooked en papillote.
I am far from qualified to pass judgment on the value in this case cultural insulation on the one hand or the tendency towards cosmopolitanism on the other. If Malian food can be loosely taken to represent culture, it runs on parallel tracks. The social substrate incorporates new ideas only very slowly, maintaining tradition, not for its own sake, but because the traditions are where social bonds are formed and strengthened. The economic arenas of life encourage a more creative and simultaneously more destructive approach, where bit by bit, new ideas are created, nurtured, and finally recast as local. Of course, this takes time, just as it took time for America to take pizza as its own, and for England to assimilate curry. For two centuries after its introduction to Italy was the tomato was little more than a curio, a pretty plant, but thought to be poisonous.There are ingredients here - eggplants, celery, ginger - that speak to the possibility of deconstructing and reconstructing our foods as we see fit, but those ingredients seem to habitually find their way into the same tried and true dishes. And it shouldn't be surprising. El Bulli is not the norm, it is avante-garde, transgressive, not to mention insolvent. The sudden creation of wholesale newness is the exception, rather than the rule - If I want cultural symbiosis, I have to either wait for it, go out and make it for myself, spread the word, and hope it catches on with the locals. Malian food, and with it, Malian culture, is changing in the spaces opened by commerce and competition, but the changes will only last so long as they are accepted by the families dipping their hands into a metal bowl of toh. Mali is producing its own food, and its own culture, out of the jumble of possible options presented by the flux of the world and co-opted by its own past. It is impossible to know where the old guard will bend to new tastes and where it will stand firm. We cannot know which new marriages will work, what ideas will stick, and what tastes will catch on and become symbolic of the time and place. I have a few pet hopes though. A few blocks away from where we live there is a French café that sells chocolate croissants, pain au chocolat. Just a few steps past the café, there is a Malian woman with a pot full of palm oil, frying bananas.
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