Health certificates are great, but can the chef really cook?

Ever visited a household and got served a meal so crappy you felt like dragging the family to the nearest police station?

Perhaps, it wasn’t even something fancy. Just ugali, sukuma wiki and beef stew, except the meal turned out to be the motivation behind Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”.

The ugali was colder than a night runner’s behind, despite having just popped off the stove. Worse, the cook tried their best to whip national cohesion and integration into it but failed miserably. With each bite, you tasted every grain of flour and every gooey lump while your mouth swore it was bumping into tepid water.

Beef, the easiest thing in the world to cook, had this shiny fat floating all over the place, in watery soup, and no salt – or too much of it. The sukuma wiki? No self-respecting goat would have touched it.

Yet the man of the house happily chomped away while talking animatedly, sweat dripping down his face. This made you wonder whether he was having a ball or just playing a game in the interest of maintaining peace, love and unity. “These people eat this rubbish every day?” you mused, forgetting that they had a visitor that day – you –, meaning the chef put their best foot forward.

What’s intriguing, and researchers in our universities ought to burn the midnight oil on this, is that homes where bad food is perennially on the menu tend to be ridiculously generous. You torture yourself through a huge portion and lean back mumbling, “phew!” only for the woman of the house to step forward and slap more goo on your plate with the cutest smile you ever saw.

The ancients had this thing figured out. When a boy brought home a girl he called “the one” and installed her in his chamber, she was immediately placed on “field attachment” in her mother-in-law’s kitchen. The internship lasted months or years depending on circumstances. Only when her mother-in-law was satisfied that progress reports consistently indicated “meets expectations” was she handed three stones, three sooty sufurias and given the power to cook.

The downsides

This arrangement had its downside. There was the sheer terror of a teenage girl moving in with strangers and getting bullied, bad-mouthed and sneered at into learning their ways. Sometimes, the atmosphere became so toxic that the old man engaged his constitutional powers and terminated the field attachment forthwith. Anything to stop the women in his household from killing each other or driving him crazy.

Fortunately, that nonsense has ended. Young women won’t stand getting bullied. Sons won’t let loving mothers bully their wives. And fathers want nothing to do with that charade. Boys, therefore, marry girls who assume full wifely duties with immediate effect. If, God forbid, they were raised in households where ugali never achieved national cohesion and integration, the poor bastard only gets to enjoy a decent meal when he is part of a dowry negotiating party – or the rare occasion when he sneaks into a “hotel”.

I said “sneak” because where I come from, eating in hotels is so frowned upon that losers who do it are well known. “That fool walks like a person, but he is useless – eats in hotels.” Such is the disdain that hotel owners stick a dirty curtain across the door, so that patrons can slip in and eat, unobserved by busybodies and gossips lounging around the market. 

Inside the hotel, stuck on the wall, will be certificates declaring that the entrepreneur pays all manner of taxes; that the toilet works; and that their workers are clean as a whistle. But nothing declares that whoever is sweating behind a filthy door whose entry is limited to “staff only” is qualified to boil an egg.

The National Intelligence Service would never say this aloud, but they know that there are thousands of people employed to cook who ought to be rounded up and shot because they can’t cook to save their lives.

Brethren, I have eaten half-cooked rice in a “resort”. Rice!