The World in My Kitchen (17 page)

The next day, while Jimmy was in meetings, I roamed around the small town. Low-lying buildings and arcades that housed small shops surrounded Dodoma’s main square: a restaurant here and there, a tire place, a garage, and two Indian grocery stores. I went into one of the grocery stores; most of the shelves were almost empty, with just a few cans, some vegetables, soap, and sprays for cockroaches. Beyond the grocery was a beauty salon. As I looked through the glass, I saw women who had their hair done in very intricate braids, a fashion that would hit New York years later. Their hair was beautiful; each woman seemed to have a different design. What patience they had!

Next to the beauty salon was an Indian sweet shop offering desserts much like the one I had in Dar es Salaam; further down was a small store, a hole in the wall, selling fried samosas and other Indian dishes. At one corner of the square was a stand selling tiny pieces of liver on skewers and roasted tiny bananas. I tried a couple of bananas and was quite surprised; they were so sweet, and their strong aroma was intoxicating. Near the center of town were large villas built by the English after World War I. They now housed expatriates working on the new capital. A little further from the center were simple, one-story stucco houses with red tiled roofs that Tanzanians and Indians lived in—those, of course, who owned businesses. Several villages of Wagogo (Dodoma’s local tribe, Kahama’s people who lived in sunken mud houses), surrounded Dodoma. When I recounted what I had done during the day, Jimmy told me that about ten miles out of town were encampments of Masai, a tribe who raised large herds of goats and cows. The town had a country club, left over from the British colonials, with a swimming pool and tennis courts. Today the club’s members were Tanzanians who had come from Dar es Salaam to work on the capital project and wealthy Indians and expats who came from Scandinavia, England, France, and Germany.

That night we ate in a garden restaurant with an enormous grill. Small, scrawny chickens, marinated for an entire day in lime juice, hot peppers, ginger, and cloves, were broiled and served with grilled bananas and beer. I was famished and gobbled the moist, lean chicken flesh. I can say now, without a doubt, that the Tanzanian way of preparing fowl is the best I’ve ever discovered in all my travels. I was so enchanted by the way they cooked the chicken, that later on I used that recipe in one of my cookbooks.

A few days later, I flew back to Dar es Salam. Jimmy told me he would resign in a few weeks and fly back to New York to wait for the president and Kahama to apply to the UN for his return. As I boarded the plane to New York, “No problem” were the last words I heard. The suitcase turned up two months later after a wonderful vacation.

Once back in New York, Jimmy waited impatiently for a word from the UN.
Would he go back to Dodoma and design the center of the new capital?
Six months went by before he received the hoped-for answer. Jimmy and Thomas were jubilant. Thomas insisted that we all take Swahili lessons before the summer.

For the next three weeks, I saw little of Jimmy. He had to choose a team to go with him, and he worked day and night on the preliminary design of the capital. He selected two young architects: John Diebboll, a soulful, quiet twenty-three-year-old who seemed almost to worship his boss, and Tom Anderson, more experienced than John, and quite ambitious, and a few others as well. They all left at the end of March with the promise that I would follow with Thomas in June. Marianne, home from college, would hold the fort in New York, along with my intrepid Lucy. The end of June arrived very quickly, and now it was our turn to suffer a slew of shots and quinine pills. Jimmy’s letters were full of requests: bring food (there was very little in Dodoma) like canned beans, sugar, flour, powdered milk, and spices. Don’t forget makeup, lots of it, cheap calculators, utility candles, and over-the-counter medicines. Stop in Paris and buy a bicycle for Thomas, along with fresh butter, cheese, cookies, and crackers. A letter would arrive every week with new requests. I ordered a food processor with a transformer and stocked up on shampoo. At the airport, we looked like refugees leaving New York forever.

The plane from Paris to Dodoma stopped in Ethiopia for a couple of hours. As we left the plane, I was told by an airline official that Thomas and I could not go back on the plane because they needed our seats for a Chinese delegation. I stood there dumbfounded. We would have to stay in Addis Ababa for two to three days until another plane came. Sitting on a hard plastic airport chair, I looked at Thomas, whose lanky legs were drawn up to his chin, patiently waiting. I suddenly had an idea. I whispered to him, “Throw yourself on the floor and start moaning. Say you are very sick and try to throw up.” Thomas was so convincing that the manager of the airline, fearing that something terrible would happen to my son, decided to put us back on the plane in first class!

The house in Dodoma was spare, airy, and large, with two bedrooms, a living/dining room, and a simple kitchen with an electric range and a refrigerator. The sink had only one faucet for cold water. The bathroom was rudimentary, but the house was bright and very breezy. There was a lovely garden with an avocado tree and a papaya tree. Jimmy had chosen a young Tanzanian in his early twenties to help us with the house. Simon (many Tanzanians have two names, one English and one Swahili) would clean, take care of the garden, and help me in any way I wanted. He lived two hours away and walked to our house every morning. I stored the butter and cheeses from Paris and the bread and vegetables from the Dar market in the refrigerator. Our first night there, we took Thomas to the chicken restaurant for dinner. Thomas loved it and decided that Dodoma was a great place to be until we returned home and found the house in darkness. No more electricity! The butter had already melted in the late afternoon heat; we had to find a cool place for the cheeses and the vegetables. We lit candles and undressed in semi-darkness.

“When will electricity come back?” I asked.

Jimmy smiled. “I don’t know. The roads from Dar es Salaam are flooded, and the new electric generator is stuck in the harbor. This is a poor country, but don’t worry we will manage quite well.”

I lay next to Jimmy on our thin mattress, somewhat incredulous that we were living in this tiny African village. Suddenly, I heard a light thud on our bed, as if something had fallen from the ceiling. I screamed, Jimmy lit a candle, and we looked down. On the sheet were two small lizards, light green and about four-inches long; six more were still clinging to the ceiling. Jimmy tried to reassure me.

“Don’t be afraid…relax, Colette…they’re harmless.”

“I hate lizards and large bugs.”

“But these are very friendly; in fact, they eat the bugs that would hurt you.”

With this statement, he swept our new friends off our blanket.

For the next few weeks, I would count the lizards on the ceiling before I closed my eyes. If they were only a few—three or four—I’d fall asleep, but if there were more, I had a hard time. A few days later, when I admitted to Simon that I was afraid of lizards, he made a point of removing most of the lizards with a broom just before he left the house. I was grateful for this.

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.”