Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  ¼ teaspoon allspice (optional)

  FOR THE CUSTARD

  1 egg

  1 cup milk

  2 to 3 bay or lime leaves

  Toasted slivered almonds (optional)

  A pinch of nutmeg (optional)

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cut the onion into small slices, then fry slowly in oil in the dutch oven you’ll use for baking the final product, or in a separate sauté pan, until almost caramelized. Soak the bread in milk until soft, then squeeze out excess liquid. Chop the cashew nuts in a food processor, being sure not to pulverize them but leaving very small pieces. Chop the ginger finely and dice the apricots. Combine all ingredients except for those in the custard and mix well in a bowl, adding a very small amount of additional hot water if too dry, then place in a dutch oven that has been lightly greased. Bake covered for 30 minutes, then uncover. Beat the egg into the cup of milk to make the custard, pour the mixture over the top of the bobotie (see note), add bay leaves, and allow to bake uncovered for another 20 minutes or until the custard has set. Cooking time (which is based on a 3 ½-quart Le Creuset) may vary depending on the type and size of the dutch oven you use, so it’s best to test for doneness. (Note: A knife or skewer pushed into the bobotie should come out dry or with just a small amount clinging to it.) Also feel free to use more custard mix if you’re using a wider pot or the custard fails to over the nut mixture. Add toasted almonds and grated nutmeg (optional) to taste just before serving.

  It’s a Cape Malay tradition to serve all food with numerous side dishes, known colloquially as sambals. These include various chutneys (especially the smooth peach and apricot chutney under the brand name Mrs. Ball’s blatjang) and mixed pickles, a warm cabbage salad spiced with sautéed mustard seeds, dal, sliced bananas and tomatoes, and a cucumber raita.

  On the Shelf

  I’m an avid reader of cookbooks and like to make recipes from pretty much every country. On my bookshelf, you’ll likely find works by Madhur Jaffrey and Monica Bhide for Indian food, Naomi McDermott for Thai, Susanna Foo for Chinese, Marcella Hazan and Mario Batali for Italian, Paula Wolfert for Mediterranean, and Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless for Mexican—in other words, the standby major food writers. I’m more specialized when it comes to African food, and here are some favorites:

  Leipoldt’s Cape Cookery, C. Louis Leipoldt. One of the most famous Afrikaans poets, Leipoldt, who was born in 1880, was also a doctor in South Africa’s hinterlands (an experience he wrote about in Bushveld Doctor). He was the personal physician to the millionaire press magnate Joseph Pulitzer’s son, an accomplished botanist with several plant species named after him, a historical novelist and playwright, and also a culinary expert and food historian. This book includes recipes for flamingo (flamingo supreme) and rock hyrax, as well as for more standard fare.

  The Cape Malay Cookbook, Faldela Williams. An excellent general cookbook for a cuisine unique to South Africa.

  The Masala Cookbook, Parvati Narshi and Ben Williams. This cookbook offers a deceptively simple approach to South African Indian cooking, using four masalas (spice pastes or blends): two, the red and green masalas, are based on fresh ingredients, primarily chilies, and the other two, three-spice masala and warm masala, are based on dried ingredients. Ben is a friend, originally from the States, and he wrote this cookbook with his mother-in-law. He edits South Africa’s top literary blog—book.co.za—and he introduced me to the Wembley Road House, a takeout diner that serves the best masala dosas (an Indian-bread wrap filled with spiced potatoes and vegetables) and koeksisters (a fried-dough dessert drenched in sweet, spiced syrup).

  The Africa News Cookbook: African Cooking for Western Kitchens, ed. Tami Hultman. A readily available all-Africa cookbook with effective, easy-to-follow recipes.

  IN THE TRENCHES

  Nir Hacohen, a forty-four-year-old biochemist, runs a lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where genomic research is done. His wife, Cathy Wu, is a physician with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. They have three children.

  Chocolate mousse was the turning point in my cooking. I was twelve years old, living in a small apartment with my extended family in Israel. I had a project with my aunt and uncle there: we decided we were going to make the best chocolate mousse ever. In Israel, everyone loves chocolate mousse. It’s everywhere. We spent several months trying out different recipes that we made up, using different proportions of things, until we optimized the recipe. We didn’t have an electric mixer. In Israel you had these hand mixers—a little container that you closed, and then you just mixed. So you had to sit there for five minutes mixing something. We would take turns. It was very primitive.

  It was a good hour-long experience for each batch of mousse that we made. We kept trying different kinds of chocolate, different amounts of eggs, of cream, different ways of cooling the different steps. The recipe we came up with is light because you beat the egg whites just to the right level and you fold them in nicely. It feels like chocolate melting in your mouth, and at the same time it feels airy. The best mousses are that way. But if you get mousse in restaurants, they’re not always like that.

  Making mousse was a precursor to my doing science. Because in science, your ability to optimize things—your ability to understand your ingredients thoroughly and your ability to care about the procedure—is the key to doing good science. You can’t do a good experiment unless you are absolutely really obsessive about having everything be right. Changing a variable and seeing what it does, and trying different temperatures, is exactly what I did in the lab when I became a graduate student. I think that’s kind of interesting. I always go back to that experience in my mind and remember how we optimized the chocolate mousse.

  You can’t make mousse all the time, but in a way it represents to me how to enjoy making something great. People think of it as the best dessert, in a sense—like the ultimate dessert. Dessert is my specialty, but lately I’ve actually reduced the amount of desserts that I make, because I’ve eaten a lot of desserts in my life and I don’t want my kids to get into that same habit. I don’t feel it’s good. Occasionally, when I make a fancy dessert, I bring it to the lab. I’ve made my grandmother’s apple meringue cake for them. I have a lemon cheesecake recipe that I learned in Israel. I’ve made that for them.

  I have a notebook that probably has three hundred to four hundred recipes in it. I started the collection in junior high. Some of the recipes are in my twelve-year-old handwriting. Many of the recipes are from my grandmother and my aunt and uncle, but some are from my neighbors in Israel. It shows you how much I loved cooking early on. When I liked a dish I had at a friend’s house, I would ask the mom for the recipe. They were always like, “Really?” But they would tell me and I would then rewrite it on a sheet of paper to make sure I got it. I rewrote all these different recipes from different moms across the neighborhood in Haifa. This, too, is the same thing I do for science. It’s a secret of good science to rewrite things in your own way. That’s how you can be sure you understand how to do something.

  Recipe File

  Chocolate Mousse

  1 pint heavy cream

  ¼ cup sugar, or to taste

  5 to 7 ounces bittersweet chocolate, or to taste

  4 tablespoons butter

  The whites of 3 to 4 eggs

  Whip the heavy cream with half of the sugar until it becomes whipped cream.

  Keep it cool, in the refrigerator.

  Melt the chocolate and the butter in the microwave until it’s just melted, and mix together with a spoon.

  After the chocolate cools a little, add it to the whipped cream by hand with a few strokes and then put it back in the fridge.

  Beat the egg whites with the remaining sugar (to taste) until they are stiff (that is, the peaks don’t move when you invert the bowl).

  Fold the egg whites into the cream and chocolate mixture using a spatula; do this carefully so as not to remove the air pockets.
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  Divide the mousse into small bowls, cover with plastic wrap, and place back in the fridge until serving.

  MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI

  The Way to a Man’s Heart

  Mohammed Naseehu Ali, a native of Ghana, a writer and musician, has published fiction and essays in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Mississippi Review, Bomb, and other publications. Ali is the author of the story collection The Prophet of Zongo Street (Harper Collins 2006), and he lives in the Bronx with his wife and three children.

  Until recently, most Ghanaian houses were built without a kitchen. To cook the evening meal, women set up coal pots in the open courtyard, where all the children and goats and chickens and ducks roamed freely. Ghanaian Hausa Islamic culture strongly upholds the separation of the sexes and also defines in clear, autocratic terms the different roles of men and women—and because of this, no man worth his “manhood” would be caught sitting on a stool and fanning a coal pot amid the chaos in the courtyard. Of course there are other factors that have prevented men from entering the kitchen, the most prominent being the cultural and religious notion of women as the natural or God-appointed nourishers and caregivers, and men the hunters, the ones tasked with the duty of bringing home the proverbial bacon.

  In May 2000, I traveled home to Ghana for my father’s funeral, and the first phrase (after the traditional “May Allah send him to heaven”) that came out of a cousin’s mouth was, “Baba did consume gunk.” My cousin, who was also the managing director of one of Father’s businesses, was referring to tsibbu. Also known as juju or voodoo and called different names in different parts of Africa, tsibbu is widely used in fighting one’s enemies, to destroy their wealth and business enterprises and even to kill them. Practitioners use anything from amulets to concoctions created from an amalgam of herbs, contaminated water, body parts of animals, and other natural and unnatural products whose sources are as bizarre as they are unimaginable and are mixed in with food and fed to unsuspecting victims. My cousin, however, was referring to the specific tsibbu practice of wives’ lacing their husbands’ food with potions and concoctions that are prescribed by their mallams, or spiritualists.

  It is common practice for the Muslim men of Kumasi, my native city, to marry two, three, and even four wives—the total number Muslim men are allowed under the sharia. And contrary to the assumption in some social-anthropological circles that women in poly-gamous marriages generally get along with each other and that they gracefully accept their roles as secondary wives, these marriages are so acrimonious that half the time it is open warfare, and the other half it is a cold war whose participants employ black magic to destroy the other woman, her children, and anybody perceived to be a threat to their dominance in the family.

  In 1996, my father drove himself to his doctor’s office for a routine medical checkup. He did not return home until six months later. As it turned out, Father was sick with all kinds of life-threatening maladies. One day the diagnosis would be diabetes, and the next day it would be hypertension. But on yet another day a diagnosis would point to heart troubles. Father was even diagnosed with a gallstone, which as far as I know was never removed. All this took place in the second year of my relocation to New York City, and I still recall my frustration that nobody could tell me what exactly was wrong with my father. Meanwhile the longer he remained in the hospital, the more intense were the rumors that his sickness was the result of the tsibbu-laced concoctions he was fed by his competing wives. My own mother had died almost a decade earlier and so couldn’t have been incriminated.

  A common, if horrendous, tsibbu practice is one in which women use water they have collected from washing their private parts to cook food for their husbands. Such tsibbu is supposed to turn the husband into a virtual slave to the woman. Other harrowing tales include wives who marinate meat in their own blood and feed it to their husbands. This particular tsibbu is intended to guarantee the wife’s complete dominance over her spouse’s wealth and love till his death. And then there are the macabre stories of women who go to the extreme—women who use corpse water and other unsavory liquids from cadavers to make juju potions whose main intent is to psychologically destroy or physically maim their enemies, imagined or real. And whether the effect these juju acts have on people is a mere myth (as some would insist) or reality, in my mind one thing remains true: the surest way to reach a man’s heart and even his soul—be it for the purpose of nourishment or destruction—is through his stomach.

  Perhaps my father was advised by his spiritualist to stop eating food prepared by his three wives. Or his medical doctor had prescribed a strict diet for him during his admission. Whatever the cause, shortly after his return from the hospital, Father built himself a minikitchen in a corner of his large dining hall. And to everybody’s surprise he began to cook, something he had never done before.

  Now, if any ordinary Muhammad or Abdul in the Kumasi Muslim community had suddenly started to cook, the individual would’ve been slapped with the label of na-mata, or girlie man. But my father was no ordinary citizen in the Muslim community of Ghana’s Ashanti region. He was its emir—the traditional, spiritual, and political leader. Until his death in April 2000, Father, who went by the official name and title of Maimartaba Sarki Alhaji Abubakar Ali III, was the third man in the line of the Ali clan of Ghana to ascend the emirship throne.

  Cooking was as much therapy to Father as it was defense. The act and practice of cooking relieved him of stress, while the ability to cook his own meals gave him control of what entered his stomach. So when pressures mounted from within the family and Father’s inner circle of courtiers for him to stop cooking (it was considered undignified and unbefitting for an emir), I came to his rescue and insisted that he must be allowed to do as he wished. I reminded my family that Father was not the first man to cook in the Muslim community. He wasn’t the first emir to do so, either.

  Zaki Sarki Aminu Ali II, Father’s older stepbrother, was also emir from 1977 until his death in 1988, when my father was enstooled. Whereas my father kept his culinary exploits known only to close family members, his older brother was quite overt. Sarki Aminu Dan Zaki, or King Aminu, Son of a Lion, as Father’s brother was commonly referred to, cooked in the open space of the courtyard under the glare of his four wives, countless extended family members, and even visitors. I was only an adolescent then, and any time King Aminu finished cooking, he would scream across the courtyard and insist his wives come and taste his delicious dish. Occasionally he would dare them to a cook-off. None of King Aminu’s wives ever took him up on the challenge, and everybody suspected that they were reluctant because they revered him, not because they considered themselves inferior cooks.

  King Aminu was one bold cook. He ventured where few West African men dare to go: he made soups. Generally, making soup in West Africa is not the simple, pleasant culinary affair that it is in the United States, where with the aid of prepackaged broths, bouillons, and other ready-to-cook ingredients, one can mix in some vegetables and come up with a hot dinner in no time. It takes years of experience to truly know how to make Hausa soups, which don’t lend themselves to the “set it and forget it” mode.

  We Hausas are known throughout West Africa for our soups, made from purely organic plants and tree pods like baobab, which is found only in the arid savannah regions of northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. And unlike peanut butter soup, palm nut soup, and pepper soup, the ubiquitous soups in the West African region, kuka (baobab-tree pod), ayoyo (jute), shuwaka (bitter leaf, derived from vernonia, a small evergreen shrub found all over Africa), taushe (egusi watermelon seed), bushen-shen kubewa (dried okra), and many more whose English or scientific names are impossible to find, are Hausa-specific creations that have in the past twenty-five years been adopted by many other ethnic groups and cultures in West Africa.

  In my childhood, soups like taushe were rarely made. It required each family to spend weeks breaking the shells that contained the melon seeds, one seed at a time, in order to
get just enough to make the soup, which, even though bitter, has a surprisingly delicious finish that stays on your tongue long after you have stopped eating it. Egusi (Colocynthis citrullus lanatus) is one of three hundred melon species found in tropical Africa. The fruit resembles a small, round watermelon but is not edible (its white flesh is dry and quite bitter). The seeds look like large white melon seeds and are usually eaten as a snack or used in cooking. Ground egusi are now mass produced and can be found in food markets all over West Africa and in grocery stores in North American and European cities with large concentrations of Africans.

  Unlike his brother King Aminu, my father did not attempt to prepare soups. He made scrambled eggs, boiled plantains, tomato stews, kontomire sauce (made with small white eggplant, palm oil, and the main ingredient, kontomire leaf, also derived from cocoyam), spaghetti, salad, and other dishes that didn’t require the attention, expertise, and time soups demanded. The three sisters with whom I share the same mother were Father’s soup makers. They took turns making soups at their houses and bringing them over to him. With our mother long dead and not competing for his attention or money, Father had come to believe that my sisters were the only people he could trust not to lace his food with black-magic potions.

  My interest in cooking started during my childhood. I was a mom-ma’s boy in my adolescent years, and by default my mother’s errand boy. While women in our compound sent their sons to go and play with other boys outside, Mother kept me close to her when she cooked supper. She would send me across the vast courtyard to fetch Maggi bouillon cubes from the living room’s cupboard or to get a gourd of water from the standpipe located in the center of the house. Once in a while she would ask me to pour the water I fetched into the soup pot, or to peel a Maggi cube from its wrapper and toss it into the boiling stew. I was delighted at such opportunities, and I relish the memory of them to this day.