Babula Cooking

A few months ago, my friend Ruth (yes, the Ruth of rooibos chocolate cake and buamba fame), handed me a small, square, well-worn booklet, stored in a protective Ziploc bag. “The cookbook I was telling you about – the one compiled by missionaries where I grew up in central Zaire. I think you will like it.”

Like it I do. The recipes in Babula Cooking III (named after the Tshiluba word for a small charcoal stove) come from the kitchens of about two dozen women, and bear cozy, homespun names such as “My Best Gingerbread,” “Crazy Cake”, “Company Pudding,” “2-Minute Mayonnaise,” “Eggplant Supreme,” and “Mother Merle’s Corn Soup.” But Babula Cooking is more than an Africanized Garden Club cookbook – it is also a survival guide for wives and mothers far from supermarkets and reliable refrigeration. It contains handy tips for improving the taste of powdered milk (add vanilla and a pinch of salt), keeping (or getting) bugs out of dry goods like flour, rice and beans, and preserving meat through canning and corning. And the recipes themselves speak to these women’s amazing flexibility to devise substitutions and re-create the smells and tastes of home.

Lack ketchup? Try puréed tomatoes with sugar and vinegar. Don’t have garlic? “From the forest come leaves and bark with a very pungent odor quite like garlic. [The locals] mix crushed leaves or powdered bark with red pepper and salt.” Here, in the jungle of Zaire, missionary women prepare gravy with palm oil, employ dioshe, a common squash, in “pumpkin” bread, and use papayas to make jam “almost like peach jam.” Meri-meri (a local berry) are the sweetly tart secret in muffins, cobblers and jelly, while mangoes fill in for apples in cobbler, pie, sauce and butter. In a display of thrift, leftover oatmeal and rice get transformed into muffins, and eggplant is grated, browed and mixed with ground meat as a “meat stretcher.” “Philadelphia cream cheese” is concocted with drained yogurt.

Babula Cooking is not all Mid-West-cum-central-Africa. The women also incorporate local recipes into their personal repertoires. Aurie Miller, one of the editors, provides this introduction to her recipe for bidia, a stiff porridge made from cornmeal and manioc (cassava) flour:

“African women do not measure but know how many handfuls to put in from long practice. They laugh hilariously when they hear there is a recipe! It would be well for you to watch someone whose bidia you like to figure out your own proportions….” Marcia Murray adds that bidia can then be cubed and fried: “Eaten with salt and catsup,” she notes, “They are like hush puppies.”

This, the third edition of Babula Cooking, was published in 1985. In the foreword, the editors write: “Our hope is that we become less dependent on the expensive imported foods and simplify our lives as we live among those who have so much less than we.” In the era of food miles and food riots, it is a message for us all.

So, instead of having my mom send me a care package of graham crackers, I tried out Janette Fulton’s homemade version. I found it hard to roll the dough thin enough, so they didn’t have the right crunch, and the texture was a bit too crumbly…but the taste? Well, I’ll be darned if they didn’t taste like the real deal.

Honey Graham Crackers
From Babula Cooking III
Makes 24 crackers

2 cups / 240 grams flour
½ cup / 60 grams whole wheat flour
1/3 cup / 57 grams brown sugar
½ cup / 113 grams shortening (I used butter)
¼ cup / 60 milliliters honey
¼ cup / 60 milliliters oil
3 tablespoons / 45 milliliters cold water
1 teaspoon / 5 milliliters salt
1 teaspoon / 5 milliliters baking soda

Preheat oven to 425°F / 220°C. Stir all ingredients together until well-blended. Roll out on two lightly oiled cookie sheets. Score, prick, and bake for 8-10 minutes. Cut apart while hot. Cool and store in tin with tight top.

Va-Voom

Some Americans spend their childhood in suburbs – backyards, front yards, bike-riding in the street. Some are raised in cities – hubbub, playgrounds, concrete, culture. Some sprout in rural areas – porches, animals, tall grass, big sky. Others grow up in central Zaire.

Or maybe that’s just Ruth.*

Two weeks ago, in a transaction that looked suspiciously like a drug deal, my friend Ruth handed me an expired prescription pill container half-filled with brown-grey powder. I opened the child-proof lid, took a sniff – woodsy, with a peppery bite – and placed the goods in my purse. Buamba, she called it, a spice mixture from central Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) that goes with everything. Her family no longer lives in Congo, but they always keep some buamba close at hand.

I can’t decide if I should describe buamba as African MSG or fairy dust. Sprinkle it on slow-roasted tomato, a fried egg, a green salad, some soft cheese and va-voom, every taste is amplified. I am tempted to become a buamba evangelist, plying the streets of Harare trying to convince people to stop using so much salt and convert to buamba.

First, however, I need to figure out what goes into the stuff. Black pepper – that’s for sure. What else? Ruth herself is uncertain. All she knows is that buamba does not contain salt (sodium chloride), but potassium chloride instead. A Google search for buamba turns up nothing, nothing at all. If any reader has the secret recipe, please let me know!

In the meantime, I will begin toting some buamba in my purse. Watch out unpalatable overcooked veg at the hotel buffet. Pay heed lifeless leftover. Here comes buamba. Va-voom!

*And, speaking of growing up, I should mention that Ruth is one of those women you want to be when you grow up. Even when you are already grown up.