just practicing...
In the aim of mental preparation for fieldwork, I have had to fight the urge all day to dig a hole in the ground. I am determined that I will pull off cooking in a ground oven. Like all cultures all over the world, where I am headed men only cook on very very special occasions, i.e., where there is a high likelihood of spare praise to be handed about. On workaday occasions you guessed it .... All the scraping and peeling of root vegetables... it takes hours and is incredibly boring, and the results are a tasteless hot white jelly... mmmm. So if I can figure out how to cook things in the ground I could relieve one of my 'village mothers' some of the scraping cooking tasks... apparently bread tastes quite nice straight out of the ground oven so at least I could pull off that Aussie favourite, damper.
Fish would be pretty easy, but they are not a fishing type culture despite the fact the village fronts a beach with the most idyllic view of two other equally edenic (from a distance) islands and if you look south you can see a perfect cone volcano rising out of the sea.... starting to sound very King Kong.. Oh well I'll pack a rod and reel... more amusing whiteman habits for them to laugh at.
The time my middle class white coloniser guilt got the better of me and I got one of unties to teach me how to wash my clothes with soap, a rock, and a board.... On my first solo effort at the river I swear that in 15 minutes the word had got out to the three villages in the neighbourhood and at a hundred people had gathered on the far bank.. it was raised a few metres above to get a bird's eye view of the craziest shit they had ever seen. They weren't so bad it was the 50 or so kids and their dads that wanted to be so close to me they could hear me mutter fuck off fuck off fuck off with every downstroke of the brush. What really crushed me though, the cheek of the menfolk.... now there's an ethnographer's no-no... lucky I am not one of those... to offer fucking advice. I am afraid to say I lost it. And I just didn't really rinse out my t-shirts properly... much sucking of teeth. And in fact in the fury of it all I managed to not only lose it, but also some of my wash. Luckily my good friend J happened to be paddling over to the co-of and he snared my lucky orange shirt on his oar.
So I am steeling myself for some close supervision at the fire pit, but it may be worth it. Otherwise here is a taste of what I will be eating:
Recipe for baked Alaska
6 unripe incredibly hard green bananas
3 taro
milk of one coconut (not cream, milk)
Island cabbage
Banana leaves or similar
First light a fire in the ground oven with rocks both above and below. Set aside
Get a shell, a small clam or scallop shell will do and scrape all the root vegetable, put aside an hour for this, and don't invite anyone over as this will only feed maybe 3 people.
Sing some songs and talk to your neighbours to pass the time.
Once you have a mass of fibrous gluey goop, open the coconut and mix the coconut milk with the goop to make it that little bit goopier. Lay out the cabbage leaves if it was a pizza base. Smear the goop onto the leaves. You need your greens so add some more cabbage to the top for garnish. Wrap the entire thing in the banana leaves, and take to the firepit.
Take off the top layer of rocks and lay the leafy little package down on the bottom layer of stones. Then replace top layer of stones and leave for about an hour and a half.
When ready, remove top layer of stones and cut open the banana leaves. The goop has now hardened into a sort of hot gelatinous mess. Cut into slices and tuck in. Mmm delicious.
I would practice here, but coconuts are quite hard to come by.... and my landlady is mad for chemical sprays on the lawn so it might cause irreparable damage to the chromosomes. If said ingredients are in your pantry now.... what are you waiting for... get a shovel and start digging.
Fish would be pretty easy, but they are not a fishing type culture despite the fact the village fronts a beach with the most idyllic view of two other equally edenic (from a distance) islands and if you look south you can see a perfect cone volcano rising out of the sea.... starting to sound very King Kong.. Oh well I'll pack a rod and reel... more amusing whiteman habits for them to laugh at.
The time my middle class white coloniser guilt got the better of me and I got one of unties to teach me how to wash my clothes with soap, a rock, and a board.... On my first solo effort at the river I swear that in 15 minutes the word had got out to the three villages in the neighbourhood and at a hundred people had gathered on the far bank.. it was raised a few metres above to get a bird's eye view of the craziest shit they had ever seen. They weren't so bad it was the 50 or so kids and their dads that wanted to be so close to me they could hear me mutter fuck off fuck off fuck off with every downstroke of the brush. What really crushed me though, the cheek of the menfolk.... now there's an ethnographer's no-no... lucky I am not one of those... to offer fucking advice. I am afraid to say I lost it. And I just didn't really rinse out my t-shirts properly... much sucking of teeth. And in fact in the fury of it all I managed to not only lose it, but also some of my wash. Luckily my good friend J happened to be paddling over to the co-of and he snared my lucky orange shirt on his oar.
So I am steeling myself for some close supervision at the fire pit, but it may be worth it. Otherwise here is a taste of what I will be eating:
Recipe for baked Alaska
6 unripe incredibly hard green bananas
3 taro
milk of one coconut (not cream, milk)
Island cabbage
Banana leaves or similar
First light a fire in the ground oven with rocks both above and below. Set aside
Get a shell, a small clam or scallop shell will do and scrape all the root vegetable, put aside an hour for this, and don't invite anyone over as this will only feed maybe 3 people.
Sing some songs and talk to your neighbours to pass the time.
Once you have a mass of fibrous gluey goop, open the coconut and mix the coconut milk with the goop to make it that little bit goopier. Lay out the cabbage leaves if it was a pizza base. Smear the goop onto the leaves. You need your greens so add some more cabbage to the top for garnish. Wrap the entire thing in the banana leaves, and take to the firepit.
Take off the top layer of rocks and lay the leafy little package down on the bottom layer of stones. Then replace top layer of stones and leave for about an hour and a half.
When ready, remove top layer of stones and cut open the banana leaves. The goop has now hardened into a sort of hot gelatinous mess. Cut into slices and tuck in. Mmm delicious.
I would practice here, but coconuts are quite hard to come by.... and my landlady is mad for chemical sprays on the lawn so it might cause irreparable damage to the chromosomes. If said ingredients are in your pantry now.... what are you waiting for... get a shovel and start digging.
posted by Ludovic at 10:25 PM
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