In contrast – possibly even in reaction – to this, my uncle’s philosophy at Foodloom was leave them wanting more. This didn’t mean guests were underfed, simply served enough – an aberration in a family for whom eating meant being stuffed, almost suffocating from surfeit.
Descending from such a tribe, it’s no surprise that for a long time food for me equalled going overboard: over-buying, over-catering, over-eating. Change came slowly, through a mix of choice and chance. Truth be told, mostly I’ve been coerced into having less by circumstance – periods of lower income, spells of illness. But that covetous core, eyes bigger than stomach, the part of me where greed always trumps need, remains alive and well, and constantly craving.
BEING ASKED HOW YOU made something is the ultimate compliment for most cooks. Recipes passed on this way have extra layers of flavour even before they’re cooked, for they come marinated in the memory of previous incarnations.
Recipes can be both conduits of continuity and channels of change. Stuck to, modified, lost, recovered . . . recipes are records – fragile, enduring – of individual or national defeats and conquests. In this sense, little is strictly ‘authentic’: everything is influenced by someone or somewhere else. This is true for food, and for culture as a whole. The quest for authenticity is often more of a crusade for authority, an attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down – the very opposite of hospitality.
Food was amongst the first commodities to be traded globally and this led to many cultures adopting foods that originated thousands of miles away. I always thought of chillies and coriander as quintessentially Asian ingredients. Only recently, eating dishes rich in both cooked by Brazilian friends, did I learn that they arrived in Asia in the sixteenth century with Portuguese explorers, who’d encountered them in Latin America. Before that Asian cuisine used white or black pepper to add spicy heat. Chilli was substituted because it was easier to grow and therefore cheaper.
The history of food is the history of globalisation. Every ingredient, however genuinely local it might seem, has behind – and, likely, ahead – of it a trail of travel and transformation. Still, we can’t help but cling to a dream of original provenance. The very name of a dish can affect our appreciation of it. ‘Give it an ethnic label,’ says experimental psychologist Charles Spence, ‘such as an Italian name, and people will rate the food as more authentic.’
WHEN I WAS SMALL, if my parents even casually mentioned the possibility of another sibling, I threatened to run away should it ever come to pass. I couldn’t express it as such, but I felt there was no room for anyone else in our household, that there wouldn’t be ‘enough’. What exactly I’d be deprived of I couldn’t have said. Our unit of four was privileged in many ways, my sister and I did not lack for anything, certainly not materially. Yet insecurity pervaded my childhood.
Inequality was rife in the Kenya of the 1970s and ’80s in which I grew up. There was a chasm not just between rich and poor, but between black and non-black. The country had achieved independence from the British in 1963, yet remained steeped in vestiges of colonialism, not least a sordid legacy of racial hierarchy. Social interactions between different coloured people were limited. The well-off Indian community, which my family was part of, kept mostly to itself. Such exclusiveness could not spare anyone the wider reality: it was there in the shanties you passed on the way to and from your fenced-off mansion. In the young faces you turned away from when they approached your car at the traffic lights, empty palms outstretched at your window. It was there in the risk – actual, but also imagined and exaggerated – of being robbed that led to a vigil of locked doors, changing guards and perpetual suspicion. It was there in qualms about the sun, which could quickly darken your skin, and thus, it seemed, your value. Everybody around me wanted to be paler, because white people were considered better, even if they too were despised for their ‘loose’ ways and the power they’d lorded over us in former days. Small wonder then that fear dominated my youth. It was like a tinnitus, an indistinct buzz – sometimes loud, sometimes low, always present. A symptom, I would understand only much later, of sensing injustice but not being equipped to confront it, let alone try to do anything about it.
Yet there were instances when the differences and their attendant anxieties dissolved. It happened when your nanny ate fat slices of homemade pizza with you while your parents went out to a party. When you bought corn on the cob from a street vendor and each yellow kernel, roasted brown and infused with charcoal fumes, tasted mildly smoked, and afterwards the scent lingering on your fingers was the smell of the evening near a shanty town as hundreds of jikos were stoked into action to heat up hundreds of dinners. When the ice-cream seller rang his bell and kids from all over would gather round his cart clamouring for a Red Devil. The lollies would stain your mouth, tongue and teeth, so that for hours after eating every one of you, whoever you were, resembled a vampire freshly feasted on blood. It happened at inter-school tournaments, where there was an almost democratic mingling when someone passed around a pack of Mabuyu, candied baobab seeds. The pinky-purple candy, possibly the cheapest, commonest confection in Kenya, came in clear, unbranded little plastic bags, with no hint of an ingredients list to betray the vast quantity of sugar required to make the salty-sweet nuggets that furred your mouth and left you fiercely thirsty. The Marmite of Kenya: people either love or hate Mabuyu. I couldn’t stand them, but ate them now and then out of a desperate wish to have something – anything – in common with everybody else.
My family’s circle of friends, though all Indian, was religiously diverse. We would regularly get together with Hindus, Muslims or other Sikhs for what the adults called ‘kitty parties’, where each family would bring a dish. Such events took place over all kinds of occasions, from Eid to Diwali to Vaisakhi to Christmas. Sometimes there was a karoga, the Kenyan–Indian equivalent of a barbecue, then all the dads would take centre stage for the cooking, bottles of Tusker in hand, proudly performing the hospitality that was usually the unremarked domain of women. The dads could just karoga a bit and get all the credit, while women like my mum could gain attention only through organising elaborate charity balls or preparing sumptuous dinners.
Karoga means ‘to stir’ in Swahili. Over the course of a few hours, a meat curry is cooked outside on a huge cast-iron thava, the pan set over a charcoal-fuelled jiko. All the ingredients – meat, onions, spices, tomatoes – are chopped and prepared in advance so that the men – it’s usually just men – can hang around the thava and sip beer while slowly simmering and stirring the curry to completion. The running joke is that the more alcohol is imbibed, the better the food tastes, at least to those who have – or are – drunk.
It’s said the tradition dates back to the early twentieth century when Indian workers, brought over by the British to build the Uganda Railway, started cooking their meal while on the job. They’d add different ingredients, stir each time they passed the pan, and after a few hours they’d have a fragrant lunch. A charming tale, though one that’s hard to believe given the terrible conditions under which workers laboured to build the Lunatic Line, as the railway was dubbed. It’s unlikely there was time for slow-cooking curries during a building process marked by all kinds of disasters, including attacks by wild animals. Four Indians died for every mile of the track, which cut across the country, from Mombasa at the coast to Lake Victoria near the border with Uganda.
Karoga is no longer the sole preserve of Kenyan Indians; it has gone mainstream. Restaurants across Nairobi are now dedicated to this ritual, which has managed to override cultural boundaries in a society still scarred by racial difference. It could be because the karoga clubs offer a situation where you are served, but still cook yourself; you pay, yet work. Without the clear dynamic of host and guest maybe everyone’s skin