Stockwell Baptist Church had organised a New Year’s party. There was a long table filled with food, and all the members of a very metropolitan church and their national cuisines were represented: South Asians, Jamaicans, the British, Nigerians...
What had the Nigerians brought? The usual landscape of “not really fried” rice with green beans, carrots and begrudging microscopic bits of leather-like liver, Moorish pepperish Jollof rice flavoured with bay leaves; and the smell of burning at the bottom of the cooking pot, the conciliatory bowl of plain rice, coconut rice, fried plantains, moin-moin with two spirits... and a bowl of beans.
To be a Nigerian, and encounter a bowl of plainly cooked beans in a public place, and acknowledge its presence, one would have to be very progressive in their thinking, or living in the Diaspora, or having an exceptionally good day.
It might have helped if the serving bowl was special. It would certainly have helped if the beans had been cooked in palm oil, and embellished with meat and stock fish, but, these beans had simply been boiled down with onions and a little pepper, then cooked in groundnut oil, and then placed in a neither here nor there bowl and left uncovered on a church buffet table.
In my opinion, it was destined not to have many sincere Nigerian takers, no matter how delicious it turned out in the final encounter with the mouth. A bowl of beans might be an African-American or South American delicacy, but in Nigeria a bowl of beans for its own sake has little prestige. Forget nutrition here, the bowl of beans is subject to a Nigerian food prejudice. The connotations matter.
What does one call a black and grey oily fish universally recognised as one of the fundamentals of nutrition? Not only a brain food, but also a supple joint and heart food? Nutritionists say, eat it three times a week and it might save your life? ...Omega 3, Omega 6? ...
Is it cheap, affordable for most Nigerians? The rest of the world might term it a mackerel, in Nigeria, we call it literally “the dead thing of Lagos” “Oku Eko!” “Food for the poor!” It might be the preserve of the rich elite to own food prejudices, but then again, it would probably also be the preserve of the poor to acquire such food prejudices if they happen to become the rich elite one day.
Someone once asked me what I gave my son for breakfast, and I answered that I sometimes gave him some boiled yam with palm oil and sea salt. The person made a face and laughed. She termed my son’s breakfast “Onje Omo-odo” which I am ashamed to interpret as “food for the help”.
I told her in turn that when I was in secondary school, my typical pack-lunch was a ham and cheese sandwich. It was a very prestigious meal. Once I ate it at about 12:00 noon, my brain shut down. I was lactose intolerant (which it is suggested most Nigerians are), I also have sensitivity to wheat (which it is suggested is a disease Nigerians can only catch from watching Oprah.) I wished someone had had the foresight to give me some “Onje omo-odo” so as to have functioned effectively after noon in school.
In the same vein is the simple pleasure of eating, or is it, sipping a bowl of garri.
Anyone who is in danger of snubbing this “poor-man’s” meal in its utter perfection is truly and completely lost. The Ijebu people must be commended for their garri, their appreciation of it, their inclusion of it as a course in their meal and most of all for setting the standard in making the perfect garri.
Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Mine is that Ijebu garri is the perfect garri.
It is dry, sharp, and it hits the spot. Washed twice with a glass of ice-cold water and sprinkled with almonds, it is the zenith of snacks, feet put up on a hot Saturday afternoon, out on the balcony.
There is a secret to eating garri, which is that after the first two washes, which are thrown away, the third wash is a refreshing drink, and a prologue to the eating of the garri. The epilogue is of course an afternoon nap. I have relatives who must of necessity eat a bowl of garri after their meal, like desert, but even more sophisticatedly like Japanese green tea, for its digestive and probiotic qualities. They are of course, Ijebu, and very, very sophisticated
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