Man With a Pan (37 page)

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.

Today I cook not only for myself but also for my family: my wife; two daughters, aged eight and five; and a son, who is three. My inspiration to cook arose from the need for survival (I was hungry in boarding school because I had difficulty adapting to American food during my first year in the United States). My wife, even though a complete believer in
tsibbu
and its effect on people, has no reason to engage in the practice, as she is quite confident that I will not marry another woman in addition to her. Her confidence comes not only from my assurance to her but also from the vow I have made not to subject any woman to the horror my mother went through as the first wife of my father, a man who eventually exercised his full Islamic rights and added three more wives to her. I have always wondered how my father managed to cope with four wives. Having just one is tough enough for me to handle, and I have sometimes wished I could have half a wife instead.

Before my marriage and the arrival of my wife in Brooklyn in May 2000 (she, too, is from Ghana and from the same Hausa-Fulani tribe), my American friends considered me a great cook, and none of them could stop singing the praises of my peanut butter soup, the recipe of which many of them copied from me and sent to their mothers. But no sooner had my wife arrived and they tasted the delicious soups she made than they betrayed me. A close friend was giddy enough after eating my wife’s peanut butter soup to tell me that mine tasted more like an American chicken soup with peanut butter in it. Never mind that this was the same guy who after countless attempts still cannot make a decent, edible peanut butter soup.

Though I stopped making soups a few months into our marriage, I have, in the past ten years, honed my cooking skills to an extent that I am able to hold my own on foods like steak, couscous,
suya
(Hausa-style barbecued rib-eye steak with peanut-infused peppers), broiled and barbecued lamb, crispy and “dirty” french fries, red red (the ubiquitous Ghanaian dish of black-eyed peas in palmnut oil with fried yellow plantains), and, finally, the dish of which I am the undisputed emir in our house: pasta sauce. I also make spicy noodle soup—the only soup I have mastered enough to have the confidence to make in our kitchen. It is a Japanese noodle dish, with the regular ingredients of bonito and a soup base, which I infuse heavily with African spices and fresh fish.

The big winners of this culinary exuberance are my three young children, who have the option to eat either their mother’s authentic African fare—like
kobi
(salted and dried tilapia),
jollof
rice (thought to have originated in Ghana, it is the party favorite all over West Africa and is prepared using the basic ingredients of rice, tomato, onion, salt, red pepper, and any meat choice),
banku
(fermented corn dough), and
tuo zafi
(nonfermented corn dough) with jute soup—or my American- and Japanese-influenced African dishes.

As I inch closer toward my forties, I find myself retracing the beginnings of my interest in writing back to the days when I would sit and watch my mother create a delicious soup. Just as a story or a novel is started on a blank page, a dish is started in an empty pot. I have also come to the realization that the art of cooking and the art of writing are similar: both of them require patience, constant practice, and loads of creativity, and there’s no guarantee that one’s mastery will be appreciated. While I work toward greater recognition, especially with my writing, I am more than content with the immediate feedback I receive each night I cook dinner for the family: “Daddy, you are the best pasta-sauce maker ever.” “Daddy, you make the best couscous in the whole wide world.” “Daddy, you are the best dad I ever had,” to which I respond: “You only have one dad, and that’s me!” Talk about finding the best way to a man’s heart.

Recipe File

Kelewele-Spinach Salad: Ali’s Own Original Recipe

Serves 4

Kelewele is my favorite street food in Ghana. It is made by slicing a plantain into little cubes, spicing it up with crushed red pepper and salt, and deep-frying it to make a mouthwatering appetizer.

2 ripe (yellow) plantains
Salt
Black pepper
Crushed red pepper
2 bunches of fresh spinach leaves
1 tart apple
Olive oil
Vinegar

Slice each plantain lengthwise into 4 strips, then cut into little cubes.

Add salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper to taste.

Deep-fry in oil until crisp but still yellow.

Place the
kelewele
on a napkin to drain off the oil and let it sit for 5 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, wash and dry the spinach leaves and place them in a salad bowl.

Thinly slice the apple and add to the bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the olive oil and vinegar and a little black pepper.

Add the dressing to the spinach and apple, add the
kelewele,
and serve.

Peanut Butter Soup

Serves 4

2 pounds beef, chicken, or lamb with bones, cut in bite-size chunks
1 big onion
Salt
½ cup water or less
3 to 4 tablespoons creamy peanut butter (without added sugar)
1 tomato (not too big)
1 to 2 8-ounce cans tomato sauce, to taste
Ground red pepper
1 Maggi bouillon cube

Cook the meat with ½ onion, salt, and water (this is called steaming the meat in Ghana because so little liquid is used) on the stove top at medium heat for about 15 minutes.

Add peanut butter and stir until it has loosened and mixed with the broth from the cooked meat.

Combine ½ onion and the tomato and tomato sauce in a blender.

Pour the blended mix into the pot and let it cook for a few minutes.

Add water to fill the pot and let it cook over medium heat for 1 hour.

Add the red pepper and the Maggi cube.

Turn the heat to low and cook for 5 minutes, then serve.

Eat with boiled rice, pounded yam, or bread, or on its own.

On the Shelf

The Silver Palate Cookbook,
Julee Rosso, Sheila Lukins, and Michael McLaughlin. This is my go-to cookbook because the recipes are very simple and I can find almost every recipe I am looking for, from appetizers to desserts and everything in between. I also like the authors’ insistence on fresh ingredients and the basic approach to cooking. Though the book is small, it is very comprehensive—so much so that it was the only cookbook we had in the ten years before we purchased
Yolele!
(see below) in 2009.

Yolele!: Recipes from the Heart of Senegal,
Pierre Thiam. Thiam is the owner of Le Grand Dakar, a Senegalese restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, that also makes excellent North African/Mediterranean food. My family and I rarely make chicken dishes. We eat beef once in a while, but we eat lamb almost every other day. The Senegalese are known for their succulent lamb dishes, and for me, purchasing this book as soon as it was issued was a no-brainer. I have also eaten a few times at Thiam’s restaurant, and each plate was magnificent. Thiam isn’t only a master of Senegalese cooking; the recipes in the cookbook are not strictly Senegalese. The influence of Portuguese and Moroccan cooking has always been present in Senegalese cooking, and Pierre does a good job of incorporating them all in the cookbook.

IN THE TRENCHES

Pat Alger, a sixty-three-year-old singer-songwriter with three solo albums to his credit, has written hits for Livingston Taylor, Trisha Yearwood, Nanci Griffith, and Garth Brooks. He has a twenty-eight-year-old son and two stepdaughters, ages twenty-two and seventeen, and he lives with his wife, Susan, in Nashville.

I was born in New York, but I was raised in LaGrange, a small town in southern Georgia. My father was from Brooklyn, and he stood out in LaGrange. He had only an eighth-grade education, but he was pretty smart, and he taught himself to be a commercial cook. We were very lower-middle-class. We lived in a mill house—a very modest mill house at that—but I remember as a kid that he subscribed to
Gourmet
magazine. I saw it lying around the house. He never did much cooking at home, though. My mother did it, and she wasn’t very good.

When I first got married, I discovered that my wife couldn’t do much of anything in the kitchen. She was Italian, but she couldn’t even make spaghetti. We were going to have to eat out all the time, or I was going to have to learn how to do some things. The first thing I learned was how to make a good pot of soup.

In 1973, I was living in Atlanta and I saw an advertisement for a free one-day cooking class with Pierre Franey at a local department store. So I went, and I was the only guy there. I was a hippy. I had long hair and a beard and wore jeans and a T-shirt. He’s still my all-time favorite chef. His books are fantastic. He made a chicken dish while he was talking. And I thought, That’s incredible. That’s what I want to do. I want to be able to talk, watch TV, and make something good. So I got one of his books. The other guy that I really liked was Jacques Pépin. One of the great books that I got was
Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pépin.
It’s real straight-ahead, no nonsense. What I liked about both those guys was that they were very masculine cooks. They made it look like it was juggling instead of cooking.

After moving around a little—I lived in upstate New York and New York City—I landed in Nashville. And then I got divorced. I had custody of my son half the time. He was seven and I told him right off the bat, “This ain’t a restaurant. You’re going to have to learn how to eat like I eat. Because I’m not going to make two meals a day.” I have to say he didn’t complain about it. And to this day he’s a real adventurous eater.

I do about half the shopping; I’ve since gotten remarried, and my wife does the other half of it. Often we don’t check with each other, so we sometimes duplicate what we’re buying. I buy different kinds of things than she does. I’m really into vegetables; I love them. That’s one of the good things about being raised in the South. We always had a garden. I’m one of those guys—I like to open the refrigerator, see what’s in there, and then figure out what to make from it. I find that to be the most satisfying cooking. It doesn’t look like there’s anything in there, and then suddenly you make something, and everybody goes, “That’s good. What was that?”