Stinky Food

I have been spending a lot of time with my 91-year-old mother. She is persona non grata with the assisted living homes in the area since she became an escape artist at the first one in which she resided, so Cheryl and I go often to Mississippi to stay with her and try to keep her out of trouble.

Although she is legally blind, she still insists on cooking. Last week she cooked a pound cake before I arrived, and even though I am not fond of pound cakes, this one really tasted good.

However, another day she cooked some cornbread. I was on a business call, so I was unable to watch her as she mixed and cooked the cornbread in the oven. I smelled something strange when I finished my call. She had cut the cornbread and left it in the well-seasoned iron skillet. The cornbread was brown through and through instead of the normal yellow, so I leaned over to smell it. I bet you do that sometimes too. When something looks strange, we want to smell it!

Well, it did not smell like her normal good-tasting cornbread. I think I hurt her feelings when I did not eat any of it for lunch, but something just was not right about that cornbread.

Many traditional foods in other countries don’t really smell good. You don’t have to lean over the dish to detect the smell as it is sometimes very strong.

One such food in Southeast Asia is a fruit called durian. Durian’s pungent odor is so bad that in Singapore you are not allowed to have durian with you on public transportation or in hotels. I have often seen it in the markets in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Singapore, but I have never tasted it as I cannot get past the awful smell.

When we lived in Burkina Faso, every market day was marked by a West African fermented spice called Dawadawa. This fishy aromatic spice is made from the seed of the Locust Bean tree. The seeds are cooked into a gooey black paste, and after fermenting, it is one of the most used spices among all people groups of West Africa. The fermented pungent flavor of Dawadawa means that a little of it will go a long way.

Once in a village in Upper Volta (now known as Burkina Faso) our whole family was asked to sit under a shade tree away from villagers. You may be thinking about sitting at a table with chairs, but this was not the case in West African villages. I never saw villagers sit at any kind of table to eat a meal. They either squat or sit on a small hand-carved wooden stool about six inches in diameter. Cheryl and I had small stools and the kids squatted around us as they brought us a calabash bowl full of fat rice and meat. Ordinarily, we would dig into the food as we had become accustomed to the seasoning of village-cooked food.

However, in this case, something did not smell right, so I told the children not to eat anything yet. I pulled out a piece of meat. I did not know if it was goat, mutton, pork or whatever, but it was not good. It had a very strong odor of spoiled meat.

We were in a predicament. We did not want to embarrass our hosts by not eating the meal, so I had to get rid of at least some of the food to make it look like we had eaten.

The villagers were being served their portions nearby and they were watching us. We needed a diversion so I could dispose of the rotten food. Being the only white people within an hour’s drive in any direction had its advantages. I asked the kids to walk toward the villagers and shake hands with everyone to create a diversion so I could dump our food somewhere.

I had a couple of plastic bags in our vehicle, so I poured some of the food into the first bag. The food was so hot that it melted the plastic bag and fell on the ground. With my foot I quickly tried to cover the food with some dust, and then one of the elders of the village walked up and smiled. He said in their More’ language: “You white people don’t like our food, do you?”

Of course, Cheryl and I were immediately embarrassed, but the elder laughed and announced to the whole village: “Larry and his family don’t like our food.” The whole village laughed, and in the end, we still had a good relationship with the people in that village.

Isn’t it great how much those villagers accepted us strange foreigners and loved us despite our inabilities in adapting to their culture, language, food and customs? I only wish that Americans would be so understanding with those foreigners who come to live among us.