During my time at Walazo, I mostly worked in the kitchen. I won’t go into the paltry details of my contribution there, but suffice it to say that where I once thought I “knew how to cook,” I now believe myself slow, inept and non-intuitive around food. I cannot even properly hold a paring-knife. Still, in my Walazo weeks, I learned some wonderful secrets and techniques of Zanzibari cooking, including how to make: coconut stock from fresh coconuts, a spicy mchuzi, samaki paka and a festive pilau, among other wonders.
Besides being a home for the elderly and a convent, Walazo is kind of an alt-hippie-commune. They grow their own veggies, milk their own cows, pump their own water and breed their own chickens. They have a stone milk-room (also the laundry room), where tin pails are lined up in different corners of the room, filled with cream or milk or curds or butter, or sheets soaking in bleach.
In the kitchen, we’d start cooking at about 7:00 am, and have lunch ready by 1:00. The kitchen was pretty sparse and industrial, with four huge black cooking-vats whose wood-fires needed constant stoking, and four square cement chimneys that rose up through the middle of the room. They were black near the ceiling from the layer of smoke that hung in the top third of the room. While I always found the food we created to be delicious and lovingly-spiced, the old people rarely thought so. Every afternoon when I hung out with them, they complained about lunch. They though the spinach was too watery, the fish was too salty, the guy in the bed next to them got a bigger mango, the soup was too oily, the rice had a faint burnt aftertaste, the chai wasn’t sweet enough, the beans were inedible (one lady, Bibi Jane, actually threw her beans on the ground in protest). Their complaints were creative and varied and endless.
Working in Walazo kitchen -- and fielding the ensuing gripes from the wazee -- was kind of taxing. Even on the days when the old people seemed to enjoy their food, there was no recognition of the effort (and even the love and affection) that went into the meal. Head-Chef Costa was always murmuring to himself as he stirred the pots, about how he hoped they would like this dish or that sauce – he really wanted his food to be a pleasure.
I think there are some aspects of our lives that we only notice years later, when we gain an awareness or a perspective that eluded us at the time. And for me, sweating through those smoky mornings in Walazo kitchen made me think, suddenly and regretfully, of my high school cafeteria. The workers there cooked three meals a day for a boarding school of 500 kids, on a comparably limited budget to Walazo’s. And I probably complained about nine out of every ten meals there. Like Bibi Jane, there were meals where I deemed the food totally inedible. I made a habit of stealing a loaf of Wonderbread from the dinner buffet and eating it for the next three meals, until I could get another loaf… resulting in a severe case of anemia my senior year. Anyway, in retrospect the food was fine, especially given the worker-to-student ratio, and I wish I’d been more grateful to the kitchen-guys. Maybe they were apathetic about their work, but maybe they were hoping for just one day where we'd all come to dinner and say, “Wow this food is fantastic!”
There were three cooks in the kitchen: Costa (fatherly head chef), Simai (sad middle-aged man) and Hasani (cheeky 23-year-old). When I first met Simai, he was picking out the bad beans from the good beans, going through them one-by-one on a plate, which takes a long time when you’re combing through beans enough for forty people. I soon found out that bean-sorting was his only job, and Walazo mostly hires him as an act of charity. Last year, he had a bad motorcycle crash that broke both of his hands, leaving them permanently busted and bent. Simai usually comes to work dressed up in a pseudo-suit, carrying a book and stroking his small, combed moustache. At tea-time on the first day, he pulled out a hefty physics textbook, and wanted to tell me about “locomotion.” On the second day he brought a trashy Kiswahili romance novel, which I read later while he scratched his way through thousands of beans. On the third day, he brought a gory Tanzanian horror-comic; the drawing on the cover repulsed me so much that I didn't open it.
No comments:
Post a Comment