Beef Wellington in the bush
Could African cuisine really be the next big thing in Britain? The London chef-proprietor Mourad Mazouz says so, but he made his reputation at Momo, a restaurant specialising in Moroccan cuisine, which is about as representative of Africa as New York deli food is of the Americas.
There are many theories as to why complex cookery did not take off in sub-Saharan Africa, away from the Arab-influenced coasts. None are entirely satisfactory. It used to be said that in pre-colonial African societies there was never a leisured class that could devote time, money or servants to the development of fine dining. But it seems unlikely that a civilisation that could build the slave trade-wealthy kingdoms of the Bight of Benin did not have the wherewithal to put together a fancy dinner.
A more plausible theory is based on the fact that cuisines seem to migrate along latitudes, or climatic belts. You can find, for example, some form of glutinous flour dried into strings or shapes—pasta or noodles—in most countries from the Mediterranean to the sea of Japan. But couscous, north Africa's "pasta," never made it even 200 miles south. It does seem that the food cultures of the more "vertical" continents are less complex: there are not many thrills in the native cuisines of the Americas, either.
In India and the far east, European colonists adapted and assimilated many local dishes. But not in Africa. Most Europeans never even sampled them: those who did generally said "yuk." The African porridges based on maize, millet, yam, cassava and plantain were particularly scorned: a character in an Isak Dinesen novel describes the east African millet meal ugali as "fit only for Africans and pigs." These carbohydrate stodges—fufu in west Africa; posho, nshima or mealie meal elsewhere—are the African staple. Their window-putty consistency makes them hard to take at first, but with a good stew and some piri-piri sauce, ugali goes down pretty well. And there are comparable staples in Europe—the Scots adventurers and missionaries who thrived in central Africa cannot have thought ugali so very alien.
I've only ever found one 19th-century explorer with anything positive to say about African porridges, and that was Richard Burton. In his Wanderings in West Africa (1863), he writes: "Fufu is composed of yam, plantain or cassava; it is peeled, boiled, pounded and made into balls, which act the part of European potatoes, only it is far more savoury than the vile tuber, which has already potatofied at least one nation, and which no man of taste ever looks [at]…" But Burton's enthusiasm failed to globalise the African stodges. In the 1930s, Selfridges published the best-selling Recipes of All Nations. Its 800 pages contain 120 recipes from France, but only ten from sub-Saharan Africa, none of them for a porridge.
This January, while in Kenya, I met Hezron Ayodi, who in 1952 qualified as a chef from a cookery school run by a British lady, Miss Peaches, in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru. He went on to cook for British district commissioners in Dar-es-Salaam and Uganda. He told me that his employers would never have eaten ugali or any food prepared in an African style. As we talked, Hezron made mango crumble with cinnamon, ginger and sugar in the topping, his adaptation of a Miss Peaches original. On the radio came the ugly news of the first post-election riots. The crumble was delicious. Hezron, who is 74, now works for the British safari company Abercrombie and Kent, and specialises in putting on three-course meals for parties of 145 campers in the middle of the bush. He let me leaf through his cookbooks: bread and butter pudding, toad in the hole and beef Wellington are the staples of today's African adventurers. Hezron has been tipped by Bill Gates (about £90) for his fillet of chicken in white sauce wrapped in spinach. He has twice cooked for Prince Charles. Always the same traditional English food? Hezron smiled—that's what the tourists like. But what he'd really like to cook, though he's never left east Africa, is leg of lamb Moroccan style.
Lunch on Lord Rothermere
Restaurants are opening in London as if there was no gloom. I'm particularly curious about two new places. The latest venture of Michelin-starred chef Tom Aikens is a fish and chip shop in Chelsea. Tom's Place sells only wild fish that's "sustainably caught" (there's a phrase we can argue about). It means the price of a fillet of beer-battered cod is over £12. But—and this is very important—he will fry your chips in beef dripping if you choose. I haven't yet been to Le Café Anglais, Rowley Leigh's new restaurant in the Whiteley's building in Bayswater. Leigh, an adaptor and resurrector of traditional English dishes, is perhaps the best of the London chefs from the 1990s boom who has not been shanghaied for television. I feel I spent a lot of that decade having lunch at his Kensington Place, in Notting Hill. Lunch was usually with colleagues from the Evening Standard and Daily Mail; the newspapers paid the bill. And as it was the 1990s; lunch often went on till dinner. If we kept Rowley, who is notoriously profligate on his ingredients, in business, I reckon it was a better use of Rothermere money than most.
