Acarajé, by MundoPerfeito

What was it with me and food this morning?

I woke up, first of all, to an e-mail from my friend Gillian Marcelle, who’s back in Johannesburg but still dreaming of her time in Salvador da Bahia. Gillian and I have been talking food a great deal lately. The other day, for instance, I came across this photo of a Bahian specialty called acarajé. It made my mouth water. (Here, incidentally, is the Flickr link to photos tagged with the word “acarajé”). So I had to ask Gillian about acarajé, which this web site suggested is akin to our accras (which in other islands are known as codfish balls, codfish fritters or bacalaoitos).

Gillian explained that acarajé was the premier street food of Bahia. It’s made from a batter made from black-eyed peas (which probably makes it more akin to pulori than accra), and, like all the best street foods, fried. But, as Gillian said, “the fillings are what make it special.” She compared it to our own bake-and-shark, adding that “The best is okro and salted shrimp with pepper.”

This morning, Gillian continues our discussion by e-mailing me me a list of classic Brazilian dishes: feijoada, moqueça de caranguejo (crab stew), caruru. . . . Not a kind thing to do to a friend whose only breakfast options at that point were muesli and toast! Then I check in on the Caribbean Beat Blog, where Nicholas has linked to a New York Times story about a former janitor called Edwin Rodriguez who has invented a green plantain peeler and another tool called the Tostonera E-Z Smasher.

Instantly — two memories!


The first: Tostones! I first came across these delectable objects in the Dominican Republic in 1988. Who needed bread? But tell that to the other three young people I happened to be travelling with, who happened to be French and who requested baguettes everywhere we went. Me, I was scarfing down tostones at breakfast, lunch and dinner. At their best they’re practically diaphanous and melt in your mouth. I tried making them at home a couple of times, but the process is time-consuming — I’m not the most patient of cooks. I can certainly see how Edwin Rodriguez’s invention could change my mind about taking another stab at tostones-making.

Memory #2: Nicholas refers to Edwin Rodriguez as “something of a plantain evangelist”, which reminded of the “breadfruit evangelist” of Fort-de-France, Martinique, proprietor of a restaurant on Rue Blénac called Le Second Souffle, meaning “second wind”, though I’m certain there must have been non-francophone tourists who thought it meant “The Second Soufflé”, and clambered eagerly up the stairs expecting to be served rich-but-airy classic French dishes.

Le Second Souffle’s stock in trade was a hardcore but tasty and imaginative menu centred around breadfruit and other local ingredients — no meat, no sugar, no wheat flour or any of the other slow-killers which fill our lives with such delight. I have fond memories of eating bread made of breadfruit flour and mami apple juice there, but unfortunately have no memory of anything else (probably due to brain damage from over-consumption of sugar and wheat flour).
 
But I’m not the only person who had food on the brain this week. On February 1, my Global Voices colleague Ethan Zuckerman riffed off this New York Times article about Ghanaian street food on his personal blog. “Read any guide to travel in Africa,” Ethan writes, “and you’ll get caution after caution about eating street food. Follow this advice and you’ll never get beyond the buffets in the five star hotels. My experience eating my way around the world? I’ve gotten sick from five star meals many more times than I’ve gotten sick from street food.”

Damn straight. I’ve been sick only twice on my travels. The first time was in Florence, Italy (bad combo of chianti, pizza and berry gelato?), and will go down in history as the only time I ever vomited purple. The second was after a very fancy cocktail party hosted by the Regional Council of Martinique, and the culprit, I think, was either caviar or smoked salmon. (That one will go down in history as the first time I ever vomited bile, then had to fly the next day in a 20-seat twin otter during hurricane season.) Neither of these situations, I think, would quite qualify as “Third World”.

The time I was absolutely convinced I’d be ill was when I visited a batey, one of the slum-like settlements in the Dominican Republic where Haitian sugar cane workers are housed. I was there to interview the head of one of the organisations agitating for improvements to the appalling conditions under which the workers lived, a wonderful man whose name I regret I cannot now remember.

We met in his home, a dark, cramped hut with walls of earth, and, as inevitably happens in DR, I was offered a cafecito – a thimble-sized cup of highly sweetened coffee. No problem there – give me coffee any time of day as long as it’s before 5pm. My concern was the cup. I had seen no evidence of running water anywhere in the batey, and the tiny glass cup was encrusted with a film of something cloudy, like the glasses in those old ads for Cascade (“virtually spotless!”) dishwasher detergent, except ten times worse. But it would have been impolite to refuse, so I accepted, praying that the combination of caffeine and sugar would prove lethal to any bacteria.

And sure enough, I woke up the next day in the pink of health, and did some serious damage to yet another plate of tostones.