Le Nosh: Food au Benin

I meant to post this about a week ago, but I didn’t get to it until now... Benin, as a whole, is not terribly computer-friendly.




It’s been a week since I got here, and a week since I went a whole day without eating fish, tomatoes, and onions. The diet as a whole is extremely carb-heavy – the bulk of most meals is either rice, pasta, pate (“pot” – congealed cornmeal stuff), or potatoes, and there’s always bread on the side. Meat is expensive, so fish is the go-to protein. I am so, so sick of fish.


Pate really deserves a post on its own, so I might expand on it later. Basically, though, it’s a whole bunch of cornmeal cooked in water over an open flame, then beaten with a wooden spoon for a while. You pour it either into a mini cooler or into Tupperware-like forms, let it cool until it solidifies a little, then flip it out onto your plate. It’s kind of a weird texture, something between grits and warm carb-y Jello, and you eat it with tomato/onion sauce.



There are different kinds, too: the basic is pate blanche, and then there’s pate rouge (made red with palm oil) and pate noir (purpley colored, made with yams). Not exotic enough for you? Try akassa, which is fermented pate blanche and is even jigglier. You can’t eat the stuff alone (or I can’t), so there are a variety of sauces to amp up the flavor: sauce de legume involves spinach and sesame and is really good, sauce de gombo is okra-based and slimy… I can’t do that one. And then there’s good old tomato sauce, plain and simple.



Other foodie revelations:

- Oranges here are green. If you buy them on the street, they cut a hole in the top and you suck the juice out through there. Delicious, fresh, and healthy.

- You can get anything on the street, and it’s cheap and good – I got chickpeas and rice with a spicy tomato sauce yesterday, and a huge portion was 200 Beninese francs… about 40 cents.

- Another PCT was served giant snails with slimy okra sauce last night. He ate it. He’s my hero.

- New favorite drinks: fresh pineapple juice and the sweet hibiscus tea called “bissape,” both of which are served COLD here. Completely amazing when it’s so freaking hot outside all the time.