Tag: african stories

Our cook, Mboji, was, by Kenya standards, better than average at his job.

There is a tendency today among the ci devant bwanas and memsaabs to eulogise the skills of the cooks of their youth, and to remember the meals they prepared more fondly than is warranted.  The truth is, we ate very plainly in those days, at best, and very badly indeed, at worst.

My parents were both rather keen on their food and demanded a reasonably high standard of their cook.  By “reasonably” I mean that meat should be tender or at least chewable and cooked to the right degree, neither overcooked in the case of beef nor undercooked in the case of pork.  Vegetables should not be boiled to a fare-thee-well.  Custard should not be lumpy.  A cook should have a reasonable repertoire of recipes, be prepared to try new things and have some understanding of how to creatively use condiments and spices.

 Mboji met those standards, which was more than could be said for the mpishis employed by some of my parents’ friends.  Down the road lived my friend Irene, whose mother was not very interested in housekeeping and whose father knew better than to protest.  They employed a truly awful cook.  His idea of that perennial nursery favourite of our youth, macaroni cheese, was to use spaghetti instead of the more usual macaroni, cover it in a lumpy cheese sauce and then bake it in an oven until it dried out to the consistency of a pudding, with the pasta all crisp and crackly.  We’d pour HP sauce all over this and I, for one, used to think it yummy and be very happy to be invited down for supper on a Sunday evening (as with most people we knew, they had dinner on six nights a week but a light lunch – usually out somewhere – on Sundays and “supper” in the evening). My mother, however, ate it once and could never be persuaded to do so again. This cook also used to do a “curry” every Saturday which, like most Kenya curries served in European households was a stew with curry powder added.  I liked this a lot because it had potatoes in it, which Mboji’s curries did not have.  Mboji, in fact, made a pretty good curry.  I say this after years of learning about and cooking Indian food.  His curries would not have passed muster in an Indian household but at least he used fresh spices and authentic condiments and they bore an acceptable resemblance to the real thing, especially his prawn pulao.  Mboji did not believe in putting potatoes in a curry.  He would serve them as a side dish, cooked in ghee with appropriate spices.

I had another girlfriend, Ann, who lived across the road, and she also had a mother who was not interested in housekeeping.  In fact this woman had no interest in her family at all and, in my memory, was rarely home.  I shan’t mention her name here because she was very well-known in the Mombasa of the late fifties and early sixties.  Her husband did something obscure in the PWD and they were rarely seen about together.  Their bungalow was dreary beyond belief, furnished only with the ugly PWD furniture common to many Kenya houses back then.  My mother would have had cheerful covers made for the furniture and put vases of flowers everywhere but in this home there were few books or ornaments;  no pictures on the wall except a calendar; no comforts anywhere.  The bedrooms were bleak and barely furnished beyond a couple of iron beds in each.  I stayed the night there once, as girls do even though they are only a stone’s throw from home, and hated it.  Even though I wasn’t much concerned with comfort and decor at that age and thought my own parents rather finicky because one couldn’t drop food on the floor or put your feet on the furniture in our house.

In my friend’s house, the cook-cum-houseboy (they only had one servant; how odd we thought that!) was worse than awful.  He barely cooked at all but seemed to be employed merely to throw an occasional broom around the painted concrete floor (no rugs) and open a can.  Every time I ate there, we had baked beans on toast.  Now this was a popular dish in our house, too, at least for my brother and I who were of course fed separately in the evening from our parents (at least until we were in our teens).  These suppers consisted mainly of baked beans on toast, sardines on toast, tinned spaghetti on toast, cheese on toast and scrambled egg on toast.  We did sometimes have other things – I remember tinned salmon salad and also tinned corned beef (which we called “potted human”) and salad.  But it’s the somethings-on-toast I remember because these were our favourites and, like most kids, we detested salad.

Ann’s family cook, however, rarely seemed to adventure beyond the baked bean for the evening meal and they didn’t always have a hot lunch, either.  The mother, a career woman, ate out a lot, and the rest of the family survived on tinned stuff and the occasional flavourless stew or – when spoiling themselves – a leathery roast topside or chicken.

So I was considered very lucky by some of my friends and my home a haven of comfort, with good meals and well-trained servants.  They loved to come and stay over, or just have a meal, and my mother – and Mboji – were always happy to lay an extra place at the table. 

When  I look back, our meals were very simple.  The delicacies we take for granted today were just not available to most of us in those days, or cost too much for the average household.  Meat was abundant and cheap but usually of poor quality and tough.  I remember Ginger Bell’s butchery in Mombasa, where the carcases used to hang overhead, so that I would avert my eyes when buying meat there, which I did when I grew up and had a home of my own to run.  He was a good butcher but the quality of the meat, while flavoursome, was not what we would tolerate today.  Every week Mboji used to order a large piece of topside and this was roasted on Monday and served with roast potatoes and usually fresh carrots and tinned (later frozen,) peas.  Fresh peas, like so many other “English” vegetables, were difficult and mostlyimpossible to get in Mombasa.  Cabbage was rare and cauliflower almost unknown.  My parents used to reminisce happily about the brussels sprouts and parsnips of England, which were only well-flavoured if they’d “had the frost on them” .  As neither of my parents knew anything about horticulture and had never grown a vegetable in their lives, I doubt they really understood what this meant, but I remember them saying the same about “new” potatoes.

Back to the beef – this was our standard weekly fare.  On Tuesdays we had cold beef with salad and boiled potatoes.  On Wednesdays it was served as shepherd’s pie.  Thursdays were a bit exciting because this was Mboji’s day for spontaneous creativity and we never knew what we’d get, though it was always delicious.  I remember the remains of the joint being cut into thick slices and recooked in the oven in a casserole dish, with a flavoured sauce made from tinned tomatoes and onions poured over it.  Or chopped into a tasty hash and served with rice.  Friday’s meal was often fish, not because we were Roman Catholic but because it fitted in with all the other meals.  Fresh fish of course was freely available in Mombasa, from the markets, but when frozen food became available we used to have Tilapia from Lake Victoria, packaged and frozen by Tufmac.  It seems wicked now that with all the parrot fish and kingfish in the sea at our door, we ate frozen fish!  But so we did sometimes, served either grilled or in a mornay sauce.  We never had it fried – for fish and chips we went to the Rocco fish bar in Kilindini Road and either ate it there or brought it home wrapped in newspaper.  That was often a Sunday night supper and we considered it a great treat.

Saturdays my parents either entertained or ate out.  When entertaining, the meal would usually be soup, then something with prawns and/or fresh fish, followed by a roast of pork.  Pork was a great treat then, brought down from up-country.  If my parents were REALLY putting on the dog we had a leg or saddle of Molo lamb.  Sundays were always less structured in our household, due to it being Mboji’s day off.  Mukiti, our houseboy, used to do the honours instead but he could only cook a bit and in any case we usually went to the beach for the day.  Either to picnic, when we children were small or, when we grew up, to lunch at one of the beach hotels.  The Sunday evening meal was always quiche, which we called egg-and-bacon pie back then, or, as stated, fish and chips or a takeaway curry from town.  But Saturdays live on in my memory as the special day of the week for meals.  Of course, we children didn’t take part in the dinner parties when we were small and were given the usual early supper – but on Saturdays we got a treat.  This was usually sausages, but not any old sausages.  These were Walls skinless sausages and we adored them!  My father did too so we sometimes got sausages on other days too – but usually they were a Saturday night treat for the kids. 

Best of all, though, were those rare Saturdays when my parents were neither going out nor entertaining.  We usually had a curry then, with all the trimmings.  Or else we had Mboji’s signature dish – roast chicken.  My father maintained to the day he died that Mboji’s roast chicken was the best in the world and it, too, was served with all the trimmings – bacon on the top, roast potatoes, assorted vegies, sage and onion stuffing (from a packet) bread sauce (home-made the traditional way) and gravy.  We sometimes ate chicken in other ways; in curries for example, or a casserole.  These were the tough village birds that were brought live to the house, purchased after much argument with the sellers by Mboji, and then killed by Kaola our garden “boy” under the Neem tree near the kitchen door.  When we had roast chicken, though, the bird was especially purchased from our grocers, Beliram Parimal, and for a higher price that guaranteed it to be tender and succulent.  The comparatively high cost is what made it a treat for special days.

The smell of that chicken roasting had us salivating all morning as it drifted right through the house and across the garden.  To this day it remains my favourite dish, even in this age of TV superchefs and cooking contests and sundried tomatoes and aioli and truffle oil.  Mboji, dressed in his spotless white uniform and beaming with pride, would bear in his kuku on a large platter, and we would all murmur with delight and anticipation.  Visitors (for we sometimes had close friends or casual visitors to lunch on Saturdays) would be similarly impressed by the sight of this glistening, golden brown bird on its big white plate.  Few other homes in Mombasa, we smugly believed, could boast such a bird – or such a cook.  My father would carve with ceremony, legs for the children, breast for the adults, the parson’s nose (for some reason considered a delicacy) retained for himself.  I longed for the white breast meat but knew it as a right of passage that one day I, too, would be serving up such a bird and would be able to eat whichever part of it I liked!

Mboji worked for us for many years, but not without a brief hiatus.  He was a Taita, from near Voi, so was able to get back to his family often, apart from the usual two weeks holiday a year.  We had quite large servants’ quarters and the wife and two small girls came down to live with us from time to time, but Mboji preferred them back in the village tending to the family plot. He seemed always to get on very well with our other servants, who were Wakamba, but perhaps he was lonely because though in all ways clean, cheerful, competent and decently-behaved he did occasionally go on a bender and my father would be called in the middle of the night to go and bail him out of the local clink.  For the next few days he would skulk about the kitchen, reddened eyes lowered in shame,  having assured my father he would never disgrace us all again.  But of course he did, though never more than once a year.  One year, however, when my father’s responsibilities for the finances of the province were weighing heavy, he received the familiar call in the middle of the night and THIS time he refused to go.  Instead, he left Mboji to enjoy Kingi Georgi’s hospitality for another day before paying the fine, and then he sacked him.  We were all very shocked and my mother was livid;  where, she said, in the tones of The Mikado’s Kadisha, Will I Get Another?! But my father would not be moved and the household went into a sort of subdued mourning because Mboji was, to us, part of the family and we missed him.  We also had to make do with Mukiti’s cooking for a few days, with some necessary but reluctant assistance from my mother.

Then, with as much self-assurance as an angel sent from Heaven, Andrea appeared.  He was from the Congo, of some tribe unknown to us, and spoke French as well as a very correct Swahili in a strange accent.  He came to us by way of a friend of a friend, and was said to have worked for the French Ambassador in Nairobi, or at least for a Frenchman of high standing in the colony.  Certainly he had impressive references.  My father took him on at once and our mealtimes were transformed!  Andrea was not just a cook, he was a CHEF par excellence.  His cassoulet was a poem, his casseroles sublime.  His pastry was perfect and for afternoon tea we got éclairs instead of scones; tortes instead of Victoria sandwich or fruitcake. And as for his soufflés…well…let me just say that I have never tasted anything so light and perfect since – certainly I have never myself quite managed to attain that standard.  My mother was in ecstasy and her reputation as a hostess shot up to new heights.  To be invited to our place and eat Andrea’s cooking was considered a great privilege.  My mother reviewed her entertainment schedule and decided she could risk bigger and bolder dinner parties.  Andrea responded to this with great enthusiasm, helping her plan wonderfully exotic menus, giving her new ideas that her simple English (well, and Italian too) soul had never dreamed of, telling her of a fine foods emporium in Nairobi that imported cheeses from France, at a cost.  For the first time we tasted brie and camembert.  It is not an exaggeration to say that our family was the envy of Mombasa – or at least the European section of it.

Oh, and Andrea could do a pretty good roast, too.  True, it had flourishes that were strange to us. Gone was the familiar weekly joint of topside, replaced by sirloin served very rare.  Lamb, too, that most precious of meats, was served up gigot in style and  rather more rare than my father liked.  Pork, for some reason, Andrea despised.  And yes, he could (at our request) roast a chicken.  And a very fine chicken dinner it was, too.  And yet, as my father used to say, it was not QUITE as good as Mboji’s.  My mother vigorously denied it but secretly we kids agreed with our father.  Maybe it was the garlic, which though not entirely strange to us was nonetheless used sparingly in our household.  Maybe it was the exotic stuffing – chestnut puree, celery and walnut – that took the place of the dear old packet sage and onion.  Maybe it was the lack of bread sauce, which Andrea did not know and refused to make when it was explained to him. 

We children, too, benefitted a bit from Andrea’s haute cuisine though he made it obvious he was not frightfully keen on wasting his talents on the nursery supper table.  Gone were the baked beans (le baked bean!  Quel horreur!) and the tinned sardines.  Instead we got eggs scrambled in orange juice or poached over spinach (which we hated).  Sardines were served rather deliciously in a baked dish over potatoes, which we loved. 

There was, sad to say, a definite downside to all this culinary euphoria.  Andrea, like all great chefs, was temperamental to a fault.  He despised the other servants and bossed them around in a tone as deadly as a cobra.  In fact he despised our whole household and made it clear he was accustomed to better things, like some Upstairs, Downstairs butler who finds himself forced to work for a socially inferior family.  He launched into furious tirades which went right over my mother’s head; for one thing she was rarely around to hear them and, when she was, dismissed them airily as “temperament”; understanding neither French nor much of Andrea’s high-flown up-country kiSwahili she really had no idea what he was going on about.  She continued to be his champion, despite the fact that he was always criticising the kitchen and bullying her into buying expensive culinary gadgets that had to be purchased  in Nairobi or even from overseas.  I remember an omelette pan that had to be ordered from Johannesburg. 

Andrea was also rather fond of fitina – ever ready with a complaint.  These were generally about the other servants or we children, especially myself.  He was quite gentle with my often-sickly brother but found my rambunctious tomboyish ways not at all to his taste.  He particularly disliked me going into the kitchen and helping myself to cheese from the ‘frig, or sitting on the back stoep and chatting with Kaola, who was a great friend and occasional companion in adventure.  Andrea’s complaints were made to my father, generally when he came home from the office at lunchtime, and always began with: “Ah Bwana, shauri kidogo….”.  My father learned to dread these complaints which always led to unpleasant confrontations with either his staff or his children.  In any case, after a short honeymoon period of fabulous feasting, he was not quite so keen as the rest of us on our new cook.  My father liked French food well enough, in a restaurant, but at home he preferred plainer English fare.  Also, Andrea (who had demanded, and got, higher wages than Mboji and probably any other cook in Mombasa at that time) was proving very expensive.  The grocery bill had shot up and there were always extras being brought in from elsewhere.  My mother did not like to rein in Andrea’s enthusiasm because he sulked if thwarted and implied that no hostess of HIS wide experience would quibble about such bagatelles as the cost of importing pate de foie gras direct from France – or at least from Leopoldville!

Certainly we were eating well, but our formerly happy household was becoming a place of strife.  The servants were grumpy, we children were constantly being chastised, my father was irritated and even my mother was becoming increasingly anxious.  Over it all presided Andrea; tall, thin, supercilious and constantly critical.  Then, after some months of this, my grandmother arrived to stay.  Andrea, though he would not have thought it when he first encountered this small, apparently insignificant woman, had met his match.

My grandmother’s visits were regarded with apprehension by all the household, except myself who unreservedly loved her.  Days before her arrival Mboji and the rest would be scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom and turning out the cupboards.  Our kitchens were plain places then and not at all like the fancy “hostess” kitchens of today.  Usually they were furnished with a large wooden table, a stainless steel sink and draining board, a white electric stove/oven with two round and one rectangular hot plates, a meat safe, a charcoal water-purifier on a stand, and a few dingy cupboards painted pale green or cream or possibly a combination of both.  There would be a large pantry in one corner and a scullery near the back door.  It was a room for preparing food, without pretension.  No decor to speak of except a fly paper hanging from the ceiling, and a generally inadequate single-bulb light either naked or with a plain shade.  This somewhat dreary part of the house was the cook’s fiefdom and memsaabs rarely ventured here.  My grandmother, however, had an unusually un-memsaab-like preoccupation with hygiene, and was contemptuous of women who never set foot in their own chikoni.  How else would you know whether it was being kept clean?  How else prevent your family from being poisoned by germs?  Our Kamba servants feared her but were accustomed to her ways; she lived near Machakos and spoke quite a bit of Kamba as well as functionally-fluent and often pungent kitchen Swahili, so during her first day or two with us there was always much warm Kamba greeting  and exchanges about families and acquaintances back in the Ukumbani – Kenya could be a small country like that and servants that worked for you were often related to those working for members of your own extended family.     Nonetheless, however hard our lot had worked to put the kitchen into tiptop shape, Memsaab Susu (as they called her – it means “witch”l) was never satisfied and it all had to be done over again until she was.  My mother, considerably irritated by this bald attack on her housekeeping standards, kept well out of the way.  Like most memsaabs we knew, she was content to leave her servants alone and not worry too much about what they did with their time, provided they were always there to tend the family as and when required.  She liked a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing home but otherwise maintained a benevolent distance.

My grandmother, however, was different.  When she’d done with our house she’d go and inspect the servants quarters and they, too, would have to be scrubbed down and disinfected.  Servants’ children would be inspected for headlice and ringworm, stern lessons would be given on personal hygiene, hands would be inspected before preparing and serving food to ensure they had been properly washed with yellow Sunlight soap.  The smell of Dettol and Jay’s Fluid was everywhere.  Worse, my grandmother had an obsession with constipation; the state of our bowels was checked daily and all of us, servants included, were liberally dosed with Milk of Magnesia or Andrew’s Liver Salts.

Mboji and my grandmother had always enjoyed a wary (on his part) but amicable (on both parts) relationship.  Though not a Kamba, he was a Taita, which she considered the next best thing.  Andrea, however, she detested from the start, and it was reciprocated.  Firstly, my grandmother did not appreciate his cooking, which was an insult to his pride so severe as to be almost mortal.  For the first time we saw his self-esteem droop when she casually waved away his most tempting dishes.  The truth was, though I don’t expect anyone bothered to tell him, that my grandmother rarely ate what my mother would have called “a normal meal”.  She had a small appetite and preferred merely to nibble between meals, on cheese and biscuits, fruit, celery and pickles, anything that could be cut into small pieces and eaten anywhere but at the dining table. 

When I look back, we ate a lot then, though we were all thin.  Breakfast was always eggs cooked in one of several ways, with cereal and juice and toast as well.  Kippers, too, when available.   Mid-morning snacks were rare, but lunch was always a two-course meal, even if (when we were adults) we also had a full dinner in the evening.  This meal was usually served no earlier than 8pm so between lunch and dinner we had afternoon tea at four o’clock, between work (or school) and whatever activities (usually sport) were planned for the late afternoon and evening.  This “tea” always consisted of at least one kind of sandwich, biscuits and/or scones and a cake.  Children had “supper” at about 6 – 7pm and this, too, was quite substantial; the something-on-toast already mentioned.   

My grandmother didn’t bother with any of this, except on high days and special occasions, but stuck mainly to her cheese and bikkies, or the brown bread she bought specially in Nairobi.   “I never eat,” she would say grandly and my mother would mutter something like “Well of course she doesn’t ever eat a proper meal, she’s always nibbling between meals.”  Mboji used to make up little trays of things he knew my grandmother would like to pick at but often she would go into the kitchen and cut herself some cheese and take an apple from the ‘frig.  This infuriated Andrea, who didn’t like memsaabs in his chikoni and had already suffered the indignity of having it cleaned, and himself along with it.  For my grandmother was the type of Englishwoman who believed that only the English really understood cleanliness.   And I mean the English, not the British, because though she might have accepted the Welsh (she was herself Welsh) and the Scots as practicing suitable standards she was very dubious about the Irish. She certainly had no high opinion of the French as a nation of clean-livers and any African trained by them must in her mind be in need of some strong instruction on the subject of both kitchen and personal hygiene.  Domestic espionage was my grandmother’s forte and one day she caught Andrea not washing his hands before making his perfect pastry.  Some pithy views were exchanged on both sides.  And when my father came home for lunch that day, Andrea was waiting for him with his familiar:  “Ah, bwana, shauri kidogo”.

This time he went too far.  My father might often have found his mother-in-law irritating but he was not about to have her dissed by a servant.  That would indeed have been letting the side down because though he was not a hard employer my father did expect both respect and obedience from those paid to serve us. So he very sharply put Andrea in his place and the latter, not over-endowed with humility, promptly resigned.   A short while after he rather sullenly apologised and said he hadn’t meant it, but my father was not one to miss so good an opportunity and remained adamant.  My mother was upset but not as much as the rest of us might have expected because even she was getting tired of Andrea’s tantrums and unfavourable comparisons of our household with others for whom he’d worked. 

For a few days we had to put up with Mukiti’s efforts once more, and we ate out a lot, or fetched in fish and chips from Rocco’s or Chinese from the Hong Kong Restaurant.  Then, in the mysterious way of Africans, Mboji arrived at the back door, asking for his old job back.  To say our family was happy is to understate it.   We were ecstatic!  He must have been gratified by the warmth of our welcome.  Of course, he fell off the wagon a few times after that and had to be bailed from gaol, but we put up with itfor the sake of his cheerful face and plain but honest food, and above all his roast chicken.

As I said at the beginning, my father maintained to his dying day that Mboji’s roast chicken was the best in all the world and for him no other, however wonderfully cooked, would do.  Of course, he was quite wrong.  I make a much better roast chicken than Mboji ever did, partly because I’m a better cook but mainly because chickens today, though perhaps not quite so tasty as those leggy, free range African kukus, are a lot more reliably tender and succulent. 

And yet, like so many of my African memories, Mboji’s chicken has become sanctified by time and distance and, as with Proust’s little cake, one sniff of a chook roasting in my own oven and I’m back there in Kizingo Road waiting for our proudly smiling cook to bring his masterpiece to the table.