Marriage and meat

Last week Agnes and I hosted a guest. Aisha is another VSO working as a nutritionist up country who was passing through on her route back from a trip overseas. We talked late into the night about issues mainly covering religion and marriage, which was very informative. Her suggestion is that I take up any offer to be a second or third wife as it gives you independence when your husband is with other wives. Though that's not the model I'm looking for, this kind of perspective is fascinating and exactly the kind of insight into other cultures that being a VSO provides well.

Aisha had a craving for spaghetti bolognese which dominoed into my own hankering. Mince is available here and my plan was to hit a supermarket freezer section. The meat I've seen at market has been covered with swarming black clouds of flies and, though this is undoubtedly what we eat in restaurants, it's pretty unappetising.

However, on my trip to Serekunda Market with Agnes to buy the required vegetables I spotted a man assiduously keeping the flies off a leg of meat. It was probably goat or mutton but looked fairly pleasant, fresh and well kept. So we took the plunge and ordered half a kilo of meat and bone (D120). People sat outside the stall kept saying "buy a whole kilo" but we didn't need that much nor did we have that much cash. The butcher himself laughed at us, threw a bit extra in then convinced us to take a piece of udder to try. His cooking advice was just to boil it and that it's tasty. So I might as well give it a go.

As Monday came I cooked the meat with carrots, onions, tomatoes (which I went to the effort of peeling) and tomato purée. Served with spaghetti it was definitely enough to satisfy the bolognese craving and I managed to get in from work at 6.25, cook and eat and leave the house by 7.05 to be on time for choir.

With the udder I followed instructions, boiling it with the spaghetti. It tasted like a veal steak with a definite background of milk. (see photo) Eating it was faintly disturbing in a way I don't normally find with other meat, I was very aware of where this came from and what it did when alive. Perhaps it's a taste that'll grow on me and, as Agnes says, learning to eat the food they have here is a survival strategy. It's just that some dishes take a bit more work than others.