Forget the fork and wolf that whole chicken with your bare hands

The expatriate is fond of his food, hence the great proliferation of high-end restaurants in the country that cater only for that zero-point-two-percent of people in Kenya that the expatriate’s ill-gotten wealth puts him in (that was an awkward sentence, wasn’t it!? But it’s an awkward truth)!

At such places, he’s generally used to eating filleted meats from fish and chicken to beef and human flesh (I’ve heard that some expatriates are cannibals)! Or, where the meat isn’t filleted, he generally takes his unnecessary knife and fork and politely chips away at the meat, leaving vast amounts on the bones. People of many Kenyan communities encountering an expatriate’s leftovers on a plate would think him a terrible wastrel, as he leaves massive amounts.

What is considered ‘good manners’ in one country is understandably considered a crime in others.

And so, I’d like to adjust some advice that I gave to the expatriate in an earlier article, with apologies to that expatriate if, during Christmas, you were beaten to death for persisting with cutlery. In that earlier article, I suggested that the expatriate should feel free to continue using his knife and fork while, at the same time, respecting the Kenyan tradition of using hands to ravage a dead chicken. This was poor advice. Rather, I now suggest that you forego the knife and fork and, like your Kenyan host, dig in with your fingers.

This is in part because a host is to be respected, just as a guest is to be catered for, but also because the ‘Western’ knife and fork simply isn’t up to the task of digging into a ‘whole wet-fried tilapia’ (a dish such cutlery was never designed for) or a local or kienyeji chicken, which beast isn’t really destructible except by means of a chainsaw or teeth made strong through years of chewing sugarcane.

The Kenyan way of eating chicken or fish, is ‘whole’. Forget that the chicken might be served in sections (which have been randomly hacked, rather than segmented in the manner recommended by Escoffier), for in truth, the whole of the chicken is eaten. A chap who sits not very far from me at work is convinced that the chicken’s feet are its most delectable part; another woman, a few doors down, believes that it’s the wattle or comb that should be valued the most. My late father-in-law once suggested that a whole fish’s ‘brain’ is the ‘sweetest’ part, and another person argued that it’s the eyes that taste best; although, I think this last person might have been winding me up.

But, even in Britain, there’s an old saying that we seem, in our excessive obsession with manners, to have forgotten: that ‘The sweetest meat is that closest to the bone’. And, let’s face it, teeth can get closer to the bone that a blunt dining knife.

And so, for various reasons, let me disgust my fellow expatriates by breaking ranks: down that cutlery and pick up that carcass. Now gnaw away!

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