Last week, I sat down with my
parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ade-Salu, at their home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and we had a funny conversation
about their thoughts on their favorite Nigerian dishes:
Mutiyat: So, Mommy, you obviously like to cook many
different Nigerian meals. What are your favorite ones?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: My favorites are: whole wheat
(because it has a lot of fiber and it digests faster than pounded yam, amala, and eba) and I love efo riro. You can use any kind of green leaf to make it. You put
water on the stove, then clean and wash the dry fish, take out the bones, and
add locusts beans. There 2 kinds of locusts beans. There is one they call tetteh, that one is well-fermented and
it stinks! I don’t like it.
Mutiyat: (Laughs)
What color is it?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Uh…brown. It’s like
mashed potato.
Mutiyat: Ok, and what about the
other one?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: The other one is not
like the tetteh. This one you can dry
it, wash it, take off the sand (if there’s any), clean it very well and pour it
in with the dry fish. It stinks, too, in a way, but not as bad as the one
that’s fermented.
Mutiyat: And what is it called?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Locust beans
(Dad chimes in.)
Mr. Ade-Salu: Hey, hey, you are
talking English… The Nigerian word [for locust beans] is iru. The one that is soft and fermented, that is ogiri.
Mrs. Ade-Salu : Eh heh, that’s the
one I wanted to say.
Mutiyat: Thank you Daddy, see?
That’s why we have you here!
Mr. Ade-Salu: Iru is made from locust beans. Tetteh is a type of vegetable. It’s a very delicious, green vegetable.
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Oh, I’m sorry. So you
see I’ve been [in the America]
for too long…So, anyway, you put everything together and if you like you can
add any kind of meat: fish, chicken, anything. Personally, I like to make it
without any meat, just dry fish.
Mutiyat: But, what do you put in it
for seasoning?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Uh, you can put
anything in it, but really, efo riro
doesn’t need a lot of seasoning.You’re gonna
boil it for hours and let it be soft. If you like, you can add stock
fish. But if you want to add that, it should have been pre-boiled long time
ago. So, once the water dries up a bit, you can add the ingredients [tomatoes,
red pepper, onion]. You should chop these ingredients; it’s not going to be
smoothly blended. You usually want to use very little oil. Personally, I like
to use palm oil because it’s a vegetable oil, so it’s the best. Once you put
the ingredients in, you add the maggi
cube and the oil, and let it cook for sometime. Then, you get the vegetables
and you stir it in.
Mutiyat: And how many hours does
all of this take from beginning to end?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Well, I would say two
hours.
Mutiyat: Ok, now let’s look at
three things you talked about. The first was whole wheat. Is that a Nigerian
food?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Yes. Actually in Nigeria now,
they are extremely health conscious. They’ve realized now that they’ve been
eating pounded yam, fufu, and eba for a long, long period of time and it’s
causing them health hazards like diabetes. And they don’t have a way of curing
diabetes over there. So now, people are eating whole wheat and beans, instead
of iyan, iyan, iyan…Some parts of Nigeria
they can eat iyan for breakfast, for
lunch, for dinner…That’s too much carbohydrates.
Mutiyat: Are part of the health
problems coming from the fact that people don’t work as physically as they used
to? Nobody’ working on the farms anymore so thy can’t afford to be eating too
much starch.
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Actually, they work
out a lot because they do a lot of activities. They are very restless in
Nigeria They move around a lot, but maybe not concentrating on their work out.
All the wahala they’re doing, those people they are very restless. But the rate
at which they eat their pounded yam is really, really alarming.
Mutiyat: Ok, the second thing I
wanted to talk about was the locust beans. I remember when I was growing up,
whenever you cooked locusts beans, in a way it smelled good, but it was also
very stinky and it stuck to your clothes…and you know for an American child
that can be embarrassing…but perhaps you are used to it. So how do people in Nigeria feel
about the stinky kinds of foods, like goat meat and locusts beans…?
(Dad chimes in again.)
Mr. Ade-Salu: Stink? That’s the
natural smell…
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Over there it’s
natural to them.
Mutiyat: So when something is very,
very fermented they’re not offended by the smell?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: No, they like it that
way because that I their food.The more smashed it is, the more delicious it is.
Some people don’t even use maggi cube, because that ogiri gives a special flavor.
Mutiyat: Alright, the third thing
I wanted to ask you is about the time it takes to make these things. As an
American child, I could get impatient when making Nigerian food. I think it
takes too much time, too much effort, and you have other things in your day
that you need to be taken care of, but somebody in Nigeria may be used to it. Are
there people in Nigeria
who complain about the times it takes to cook the food, or is it just a usual
chore?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: Number one, it is
part of their daily routine. They don’t feel anyhow. If you have a taste for a
certain food, before you get real, real, hungry, you start preparing for the
food. So, by the time the food is ready, they’reready to eat too. It’s just
like here [in America]
during Thanksgiving, people cook a lot of food. It’s the same way.
Mutiyat: But how does a woman
balance cooking and working? Or is it that the person who does the cooking
doesn’t work?
Mrs. Ade-Salu: That’s a very good
question. That’s why we complain that America is too stressful. Like me
for instance, I’m a social worker. I go to work and my work is extremely
stressful and when I get home, I have to stand on my feet cooking. Here, you
don’t have anybody helping you. It’s like I work round the clock. No driver, no
housemaid, nothing. It’s killing. If I live in Nigeria, I will have a PA. That is
Personal Assistant. I will give him my daily program of all that I want to do
and he will be the one to execute them for me. So I will have time to focus on
other things. In Nigeria,
some people hire a cook. All they do is clean the house and cook for you. They
can cook all the food you are going to eat for a week. You can imagine somebody
who has a cook, a driver, and a PA. That’s many support systems right there. In
the olden days, women had a houseboy and a housegirl.
For instance, I want to eat moin
moin now, but for the sake of all the stress we’ve talking about, I’m not
strong enough to stand on my feet and make it. I just wanna eat moin moin, with
baked fish and my Silk milk. That’s enough for the day for me. But,
unfortunately, I cannot make the moin moin now, because I’m already tired. I’m
exhausted because of all the stress we’ve been talking about.
(Everyone laughs.)
Mutiyat: And Daddy, last words, what
do you want to say about Nigerian food?
Mr. Ade-Salu: Nigerian food is very
good. A lot of people have misconceptions about it. When you see Nigerian food,
you can see that it’s well-balanced. Someone[an American] once told me, “ I
never see you eating vegetables.” Where we get our vegetables is from the soup.
Our soup has efo, tomato, red pepper, onion… so we get our vegetable. Some
people think because they buy salad in the market, they’re the only ones eating
vegetable! And our gira is our bread;
it’s our carbohydrate. You also have eba
which is from cassava and you have iyan which
is from yam. Then, you have rice, you have whole wheat, you have elubo (which
is another kind of yam) and amala, yet
another form of yam. The red soup, you usually eat it in combination with the
vegetable of your choice, such as okra,
bitter leaf, or ewedu. It gives
you a lot of variety, this way you don’t get bored!
Mutiyat: And on that note, Mommy
and Daddy, thank you for sharing your thoughts on your favorite Nigerian foods
and what it’s like to prepare them. It’s always good to find out more about one’s
own culture…But, I still don’t know about those locusts beans!
Mutiyat Ade-Salu is a
New York-based actress, singer, and writer. Get to know her perspective on
being 1st Generation Nigerian-American at www.mutiyatspeaks.blogspot.com
and learn about her new play at www.sunnycamehome2013.wordpress.com.
