Banku

Some of Mr. Joe’s and my friends, all university students, treated us to a very traditionally Ghanaian meal the day after Thanksgiving: banku with okra stew! Banku is a thickened, fermented corn paste (but not as fermented as kinkee, which is chalkier in texture and has a stronger flavor), and okra stew’s most notable feature is its sliminess.

There’s a chunk of chicken on the plate pictured above, but there are also pieces of white flab that are – believe it or not – boiled leather. The hide was carefully scraped clean of hair before being cut up and mixed into the stew. Cowhide doesn’t have much of a taste, but it has an awfully chewy texture.

At the end of the meal, I finally asked the Africans at the table how they were managing to eat the food without having stew dribble down their chins as they took their hands away from their mouths. One of the guys considered the question, then demonstrated the difference in how we’d been eating: where I’d been putting my fingers to my lips and simply depositing the food in my mouth, my friend had been putting his fingers into his mouth along with the food, licking off the fingers before withdrawing them from his mouth. So now you know how to politely eat slimy stew!

The above makes it sound as though I didn’t enjoy the meal, but actually I really did! The new flavors and textures were interesting, I didn’t mind the dribbles down my chin because no one else did, and most of all the fellowship was sweet. And the guys even did all the cleanup afterward: how much better can it get? ;)