Originally written on Sunday, December 5, 2010

For me, one of the things that really defines a country, a culture, people, is food. In the extreme countries are defined by their food, by their cuisine, the ingredients they use and the way they prepare a meal.

The Italians, for example, are epitomised by pizza and pasta, the Swedes just love their herrings, the Japanese will eat anything from the sea as long as they do not have to go the effort of cooking it, the English, sometimes known as Beefy’s invented the oft enjoyed culinary spectacular that is Fish’n’Chips.

In the Middle East, hummus, baba ganoush and bread that is whiter than a polar bear sucking a mint on a glacier just outside Reykjavik. Our Teutonic cousins do a enjoy a tasty sausage, while the Greeks do love an good olive. Not too hot with the Vodka Martini’s, but a whiz with the olives!

There is of course the culinary power house that is America with… with…. with what they have.

For my five years plodding around bits of Africa, I have been mostly disappointed with my culinary experiences. On a very few occasions I have been amazed by my food in Africa. There have been moments, but not many. Swaziland gave me the most wonderful pap I have eaten, Libya was not outstanding except for the Ramadan sweets, a one inch square nibble, dripping with oil, laced with sugar and stuff full of finely chopped nuts. ‘Tana, in Madagascar gave me one of the best Indian meals I’ve ever had; Malagasy food itself being rice based being bland and mostly uninspiring.

For the last 12 to 18 months, I have been in Gabon and Congo Brazzaville, and the best I can really say here is that Pointe Noire does have one really good pizza restaurant. Chicken, usually fried, is the local ‘speciality’ but I am not really sure than ‘speciality’ is the correct word, more ‘millstone’….

For the last week or so, I have been back in Kinshasa, the 10 million people capital of DR Congo, formerly known as Zaire. As I write this, the rain is pouring, I am listening to the crackling across the skies while having some Kinshasa Rumba playing in the background. Nice.

Last night however I had one of the most amazing meals I have eaten in the last five years I have been here in Africa. A colleague from the office invited a few if us to join him for a meal at one iof his favourite eateries.

When we arrived we found a small, unassuming place, tucked away in a place where it can not be found, in a suburb of Kinshasa. It was beautifully laid out; tables in singles or pairs, secluded from each other with timber frames, with locally made rugs providing some privacy. A lovely little place.

The food however will stay with me for a very long time. Our colleague, Leon-Paul suggested we just ‘tuck in’with the explanation coming after we’d eaten. The food looked fantastic and smelt wonderful : turtle, Boa constrictor, antelope, crocodile, crickets and the Kinshasa Caviar pupæ of something we could not quite work out.

Whoa, steady on there, I can anticipate you yelling there, where have your vegetarian morals gone ?

One of the confusing and mostly frustrating feelings during my potter around the minor cities of Africa is the sheer lack of anything vegetarian to eat when not cooking for yourself. Africa is stuffed to the gills with some of the best and most delicious fruits and vegetables which very few people choose to eat.

In Africa, the foods that people value, the foods that people want to eat are meat, meat and meat, with, if at all possible, a side order of meat. As a friend in Zambia once told me, vegetables are what you have with meat, but you don’t really eat them….. Fried chicken is very high on the menu of I want with fish being pretty high on the desire-o-metre as well. Vegetables are seen as foods you eat when you simply can not afford to eat properly, or buy meat.

My Kinshasa experience however was a master class in wonderful locally grown vegetables and cooking. To paraphrase Bertie, it was delish…..

I had spinach, cooked and prepared in two different ways, but both essentially boiled, sweet potato croquettes, deep fried sliced plantain, which is a large banana type fruit which keeps it’s shape and flavour when it is cooked. There was pap, prepared in a way I had not had before, but was really tasty and another sweet potato dish that has a name I can not recall, nor even pronounce when I was told it six times. Lingali is a difficult language to get to grips with, especially for a simple Yorkshire lad.

All of this fine food was washed down with a large bottle of Tembo, which is a rich, dark beer, with plenty of body and great flavour.

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To round off the meal we had some local grown fruit, which included wonderful pineapple and something I had never eaten : mangostine. Mangostine is a peculiar fruit, eating only the inner, white and soft inner fruit, with the outer fruit, or exocarp, sometimes known as the outer hard skin, being thrown away. Initially the fruit looks like a large, plum, consistently spherical, and shares the same, deep purple colour. To open, the upper third of the fruit is squeezed or squashed, opening the crown of the fruit. This can then be peeled away exposing the white inner fruit.

Over all, it was a wonderful feed, good beer, great company and excellent food. I wonder if I will be able to squeeze in another before I head back to the culinary epicentre that is Pointe Noire.