Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: cuisine

  • men in dreads

    Two men unfolded themselves and stood up. One of them grabbed my hand. I was passing in front of the crowded colourful stalls which sell Bob Marley t shirts and long Ghanaian dresses. They had jangly sandals on display and drooping felt hats so dusty and untouched they might have been made for Stevie Nicks. “There she is!” cried the taller one, swinging hip length dreads. “Our sister from another mother.”

    I stood still, as they must have guessed I would do. The expression on my face was conscious, self conscious, enquiring. “We have met before,” his companion told me, “we spoke with you the other day.”

    I was quite certain I had never seen them before but fear of racism held me silent. Later I wondered how many Western women they trapped each week using this same trick: liberal women, hippie women, who are afraid of seeming prejudiced. Who feel responsible for the prejudice of others and when they travel the world, labour to make up for it.

    “We love your walk,” said the man in dreads. “So free and you walk like a soldier.” Do soldiers walk free? Aren’t they more inclined to march? But I knew what he meant. I was striding and looking about me. I was swinging my hands. African women, I suppose, undulate.

    There is a faceted splendour in all the people round me that keeps me always smiling and staring. I love that we find each other so compelling. People stop me in the street to say, “I love your height.” Men say outright, “Give me your number and I will call you.” I spend all day saying, “Thank you.” I say, “Thank you! Good evening!” “Thank you, but no.”

    I buy a ripe plump mango and the stallholder slices it for me with a curving blade into the palm of her hand. Walking home I eat it with a cocktail fork. I buy a Coke bottle filled with popped millet, like tiny buds of popcorn, and groundnuts – peanuts – which is perfectly salted, and in the morning I pour it on the bowl of mixed fruit I have chopped up for breakfast. My companion has never seen fruit salad and he looks askance at my heap of mango, banana, papaya, custard apple, and popcorn. Then he starts to eat and we both fall on it, good, delicious, fresh. I was not keen on the goat gizzard skewers. I am nerving myself to try grasscutter on a stick, which is a little rat-like creature grilled over the coals and eaten off a skewer. I buy kelewele, which is plantains rubbed in spices and grilled at the roadside. It’s sweet with a toffeed sharpness round the rim. I buy a coconut and the man lops it expertly, and after I have drunk the juice he chops the wood open so I can gouge long loops of slippery flesh and drop them like fishes to a seal into my mouth.

  • a Berlin evening, so cold, so sweet

    After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.

    The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.

    Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.

  • salami baby jesus

    I may or may not have been down to the markets today to visit the man who runs a wonderful salami stall; he offers salamii (that’s the plural) of goose, duck, venison, and pig. This man has taught me that the original salami were loaf-shaped, like baby cheeses, and the familiar linked sausage format is an innovation. What’s for certain is that I bought from him a plump, nipple-ended salami powdered in white rice flour which he says is called ‘the little baby Jesus.’

    He cradled it in both hands and rocked it a little, to show me. I had on my Dad’s pyjamas under my jeans and was only waiting to get home to get really, truly comfortable.

    After that I may or may not have suggested to him, Hey! You should make a nativity scene on your stall every year – and have The Little Baby Jesus as your Jesus.

    I would, the man said. He was rueful. I would love to. It’s just that – some people might get offended.

    I was crooning over my plump swaddled baby, sniffing its pungent head. “Offended?”

  • the true markets

    On Sunday in the midst of strife I had a most wonderful day. Met an acquaintance who wanted something from me, and we walked into a foreign land so familiar that I fell into my childhood, and the sweet world intricate and divine which sustained my deepest breaths when I was seven, nine, twelve, eleven rose up in me and about me again and the trees were all there, we knew each other, the soft wind… I cannot describe and no one can transport that essence, the spirit of the place wrapping its tendrils like

    a delicate sweet love

    like a plant which is birdsong, a vine divine

    or like the bride of the forest who shyly beckons shadows, and sings underwater, and has rooms for all our grief.

    You walk in through the trees and there are people everywhere, eating and chatting. I took two hundred photographs. I remembered wandering on my own in the pasar, on the markets, in Jakarta

    alone but never alone, and the trustfulness held in the colourful world back then. Adults were sexy and cool. They didn’t impose. Nobody touched me. Only the lady, the old ibu, wrapped in her thin scarf who took hold of my head in Blok M and cried all over my face, down my neck, her reddened betel-nut tooth stumps, and her grace and words: this child, this girl, she has depth, she is in the world, she is a soul I can see, she is one of the ones.

    I can’t remember her words. But I will never forget the shy proudful sensation of her touch on me and her recognition, down from the mountains, the cave with a wall solid behind it which creates a resonance.

    On the bright Thai food markets which began, my Peruvian friend told me, from the longing people had to scent and taste their lovely homeland

    where food is beautiful, and fresh like birds, cooking a kind of singing

    not all pickled, roasted, brewed, we found Asia in Berlin. The laying out of rugs and seagrass mats. The bright umbrellas and bold plastic implements, lime green, orange, blue. All the families squatted comfortably at their esky tables and their cardboard carton frying-boxes, each carton spattered inside with dark from the oil splitting off in the toiling wok –

    There were stalls everywhere, low at ground level, people squatting on their mats pounding and chopping and skilfully frying things. Freshness drew me and my acquaintance, who had said “I will be there for you in this hard time” but in five hours asked me not one question about all of my news and myself, down one grassy alley after another, under the trees, and out in the big clear grassy field. I overheard a Berlin punk on his phone saying, “We are here in the Hauptfressgasse,” the principal pig-out aisle, “come find us,” and the sky

    with its inimitable piles like God’s geography, pleasurable, transient. The sky was a beast you could watch for hours straining its leash. And then the train home so swaying and fast between the treetops and the speed was exciting, the lurching and long corners, the sense of riding rapidly above the grimy familiar streets and swinging, like an ape so joyous in his homeland, vine to vine, hand to hand, song to song – that was all I was conscious of. It was such a relief.

    I wouldn’t say I was drunk. But I was so very, so very, just so relaxed. A lady under a purple umbrella with a carton-top of bottles, the world’s smallest, freshest bar, mixed up an unholy powerful brew. In Thai German Spanish she said, “You want capina? You want mosquito.” I chose mosquito. Then she sliced the lime with two sharp chops, into the palm of her hand, with a cleaver and crushed it in the cane sugar with her big pestle. Mint leaves then she filled the whole beaker to the rim with gold Havana rum. “Drei Euro.”

    Clear tubs with jelly shapes swimming bright and glutinous in the milk, milk of the coconut, mother that travels long seas. The plangent scrabble and wail of unselfconscious Asian voices, familiar in my oldest memories and so sweet and salty and spiced and honest to my ear. Berliners roar, a guttural beery spume: in blaring Jakarta the screeching, the Bulgarian mountaintop want of modulation, the intensely modelled fineness and discretion – that is culture, or one early formation of cultural expectation, to me.

    People sitting crouched around a frayed mat under the trees were throwing yellowed dice high again and again, some unfamiliar game printed on the cloth they had spread between the five of them. Little children kicked their legs. I ate and ate. Every mouthful seemed precious. The fresh feisty fruitfulness, realness, diverse sprung view. There were plates of fried insects, sweets wrapped in banana leaves, hot spicy soups. Bright pink milky drinks and bottles garlanded in flowers. I had satays, dumplings, green papaya salad threshed in a trophy-sized mortar which filled my mouth and throat with remembered fire. The high thick combing trees foamed around the park, a large, open park, almost concealing the buildings. We could have been anywhere, we could have been in the Seventies when adulthood was a charm I held inside me. Could have been in the tropics. Could have been out to sea somewhere in the congruent, lasting, more intricate world, that was built by many hands and had trees and is gone.