On the menu

From what I can tell, there is approximately 1 actual restaurant in Mzuzu, the nearby large city. By actual, I mean cut from the same cloth as the restaurants that sustain me back home. By actual, I mean it has menus, and prices, and napkins. An LED sign in the window that flashes 'We are Open', and one over the bar that flashes 'Bar'. The inside and outside walls are periwinkle; the Indian owner emigrated from Gujrat twenty years ago. The restaurant is called A-1.

A-1 serves native Malawian cuisine (chicken, fish, nsima, chips, and rice), but also Indian food and brick-oven pizza. Just flip to the next page of the laminated menu and your taste buds can tour the world. Ironic. The majority of Northern Malawians will scarcely travel and taste beyond their own village. Let alone venture to Mzuzu, or step foot in A-1. 

Last time we were in Malawi, we went to A-1 with Alfred and Richard (our Malawian friends), for our goodbye meal. The pair tried pizza for the first time, and this has remained an inside joke and special memory 3 years later. Last Sunday afternoon, we returned with Alfred. The pizza oven was out of commission (potentially because the power was out in the entire region, unclear), but the back-up generator was humming and Alfred tried Indian food for the first time. In New York we have an entire block of Indian restaurant one after another, we tried to paint a picture. A block, I had described the day before, is like a road. There's also something called a block party...

In the villages, once our program (see prior post) is complete, the women usually prepare a meal for us. Led into a home, the room we settle in is cooled by the brick walls, and is dark except for shy rays of sunlight that creep through the door frame and maybe through a small window. 

It's usually just us visitors who sit for the meal, though even our driver, Sam, is included. Maybe one member of the village joins, but not always. It begins with a woman from the village, making herself small with bent knees and bare feet, circles the group with a bowl and pitcher of hot water. She pours the water over my hands, I watch it evolve from clear to brown as it drips off my sandy fingers into the bowl. A prayer follows and then the food is dished out. 

The meal is essentially identical in each village. Today in the car I grilled (pun) Wilson, the graduate student who helps conduct our surveys, on what the meal entails. 

There's nsima, made from corn flour. Nsima is our staple food, we've heard time and time again, does America have a staple? To prepare nsima, water is boiled and corn flour is added until a porridge is produced. This mixture is allowed to boil, and then more corn flour is added until the desired stiffness is achieved. Ultimately, a lukhenzo (large spoon) is used to shape the dough into bean-bag sized squares. The consistency is that of dense play-dough. 

To cook the vegetable dish, a soup of tomatoes, onions, and cooking oil is heated. Then, chopped pumpkin leaf or mustard leaf or Mpiru is added, and this is allowed to boil for a while. Optionally, chopped ground nuts (peanuts) are added. You prepare the ground nuts in a thuli (large wooden mortar and pestle) until they are very fine. 

We're also served fried local eggs, sometimes with the tomato relish described above. Or local chicken. Though after we politely refused the meat at the first few villages, it notably disappeared from the menu. 

We eat with our hands, ripping off pieces of the nsima and using it to scoop the vegetables and eggs. At the conclusion of the meal we again wash our hands, with the pitcher and the large bowl. 

And to answer the question about our staple back home? Tomorrow, I say, remind me to tell you about the bagel.