aboki na
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 02/Jul/2010 12:20, 34 days ago
In my whole life, I’ve probably used dental floss about four times.  That may be an over estimate.  Of all the products of the post-industrialised world, I didn’t expect to miss that one: but almost every foodstuff here makes me fantasise about thin pieces of wiry stuff to massage my teeth with.  Meat tends to be cooked to within an Imperial inch of becoming charcoal, providing plenty of jaw based exercise (Nigerians don’t tend to talk while eating, and this must be part of the reason) and also leaving a plenitude of little stringy bits of meaty fibre behind for extraction and snacking later.Other popular snacks here include barbequed sweetcorn - about 45 minutes with a toothpick - and some round green citrus fruits which are generally too tough to eat but brilliant for quartering and sucking the juice out of (like schoolboys at half time)– about 20 minutes’ scratching action.  Incidentally, those fruits are generally called oranges in English (which is what they most resemble), but can taste like limes, lemons or oranges– I think dependant on ripeness.  Hausa apparently has the same word for all types of citrus, which kinda makes sense though I think we did see some little tiny lime type things on the market which intrigue me.  Can’t wait till we can start cooking!  Or, in fact, until we have a home in general.Not that we’ve eaten badly thus far.  By far the best food seems to be in the chophouses (the equivalent of cafes, I guess) where you can get some starch (usually in a fat white lump for picking with your fingers, though rice is everywhere too) and a stew or soup of some sort.  Stews are largely like British soups– rich, red, hot liquid for dipping in with a piece of meat sat proudly in the middle.  Soups (of course) are mostly like British stews– thick and quite gloopy and often with more varied ingredients.  We haven’t really tried enough thus far, but my favourite is egusi, made from (among many, many other things) melon seeds.  Everything– everything – has meat or fish in it.  Even some doughnuts.  Those same chophouses are generally really cheap, too: meals for about 250 Naira (which is very roughly£1, but that doesn’t mean so much; we’re getting paid N1,000 / day each and large bottles of beer are usually between N200 and N250, to put it into proper perspective…).And there are masses of meat stands everywhere– usually advertising themselves asuya, which I think is formally pieces of beef that’ve been squashed, covered in groundnut / peanut paste, and barbequed on a stick.  But the stands usually have tons of other stuff too– pieces of, or occasionally whole, chickens; chunks of goat; other parts of animals which we’ve refined ourselves away from eating; and yesterday we had some awesome pieces of mutton with a coating something akin to that on spare ribs from Chinese takeaways (but not as sweet).  Tasted– oddly – like pork.In Abuja– though I haven’t noticed it anywhere else – we hadschwarmawhich was joyously lovely.  Think a UK kebab shop that’s really serious about its meat.  Lots and lots of lovely meat wrapped in a pitta with some manner of sauce (ba pepefor thebaturi, of course).In various places, which usually specialise, you buy a whole barbequed fish, usually with chips.  The fish are massive– I assume this far north they’re river fish, but I’ve really no idea (if only I could use wikipedia…).  And they’re incredibly lovely in the way that grilled fish the world over is – meaty and juicy and sweet.  Everything’s better when you eat it with hot, greasy fingers and smoke in your hair.  In  Abuja, we were guided to the Abacha barracks by a very lovely VSO who’s been here for a while.  That was just incredible– a huge circle of barbequing women, all with vast piles of the same large red fish, appealing for your trade and bartering on the price.  Smoke and people and good-natured life everywhere.  (I’m interested in Abacha and hislegacy; he seems to have been a bit of a monster in Nigeria in the 90s, when it was still trendy to be a vicious monstrous military dictator in Africa.  He died– of course – cavorting with some ladies, allegedly with a heart attack brought on by too many small blue pills.  As well as his name being attached to the barracks, his picture’s on a fair few bush taxis: don’t know whether that’s just laziness or some kind of political message; the driver telling the world that he’d prefer a bit more rape, exploitation, and general mayhem in his republic.)More or less all the food contains some form of chilli: if you ask for somethingba pepe, it means they won’t add more on just before serving it – but (particularly on thesuya) it’s still usually enough for eyes to water and beer to be quaffed.  I tried a tiny, tiny bit of pepper soup (near as dammit to being a national dish, it seems) at the first hotel.  I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything that was too hot for me to tak e another spoonful.  But one day I’ll take it like a man.  (Though I might pass on thesharku– skin – and goat’s head options.)Oh, and also ubiquitous are Indomie noodles which are more or less a cross between Pot Noodles and Super Noodles.  I think they only come in‘chicken’ flavour, they’re dirt cheap (N50 a shot), and their marketing team are incredible.  You know when you’re going through some tiny little village or miserable offshoot from a town, and some sad looking drab little shack is coated in Coke logos?  There’s one off the dual carriageway going into Walsall which always made me want to know how much effort Coke put into thrusting our faces into their elegant red script, and whether the return is calculable.  Well, Coke is here but much, much less so– and Indomie is the brand that goes into villages and pays people to paint their house walls with their swirly script (always looks the same in shape and colour: they have a good quality control team).  We’ve only had it once so far – when the desperation to be vaguely self sufficient and not entirely meaty overtook our dim sense of self loathing.  That was a happy evening: Pringles and Indomie, accompanied by cans of Star and Ghana getting into the Quarter Finals.  They’re our team now: go Black Stars, the hope of Africa!