Dining in Côte d'Ivoire

One of my Ivoirian meals - steamed corn dumplings with beef and spicy sauce

Over the past year or so, I’ve been paying much more attention to the food that I eat while I travel around the world. Writing a bit about it has helped me to appreciate the adventure that eating is. I am utterly convinced that a traveler simply must see eating as an adventure. It eating is seen merely as a means of sustenance or the quenching of familiar tastes, most travelers will be deeply disappointed. But if eating is seen as an adventure, where the next turn-of-the-road could yield a delight (or something else entirely), the experience can be more fully appreciated.  

As in much of Africa, cuisine consists primarily of some kid of starch served with some kind of stew or meat-plus-sauce. The starch here in Côte d’Ivoire has varied from rice to dried, ground manioc (attiéké) to pounded plantains (foutou), a dish that is the French cousin of the more pan-African fufu. Other starch accompaniments include corn flour dumplings steamed in a banana leaf and a type of sweet, slightly fermented corn-based biscuit. An abundant portion of starch is placed on the plate. Onto this is ladled first a piece or pieces of meat or fish, then an abundant amount of rich sauce and vegetables. If the meat or fish is served dry (not in a stew), it is generally accented with some sort of sauce. The whole thing is then garnished with a bit of hot pepper sauce (piment), which seems to appear in various forms at every meal. The whole ensemble is quite satisfying, yet I’m learning that the proportions are absolutely key. I’ve already seen two tables of west African diners get quite antsy about the perceived absence of proper quantities of appropriate sauce. To this point, my experience has been that most meals here tend to follow a more European pattern, using silverware, although the meals lend themselves to more tradition manual eating as well.

Chicken with sweet corn dumplings/biscuits, hot pepper sauce, and pepper-onion garnish

Foutou is especially memorable. I have a deep appreciation for the various pounded starch dishes of west Africa. Foutou or Fufu can be made from any number of things – corn, manioc, plantain, yam, etc. Each is meticulously and laboriously pounded until they can be formed into sticky, firm orbs the size of a tennis ball. Sometimes they are fermented at this stage of the process, but often they are eaten fresh, served with a bowl of sauce with some meat. In Ghana, most such meals were eaten with hands, with a small amount of the starch pinched off, a small indentation made in it to make a kind of scoop, and the whole lot pitched into the mouth. Here, people seem to use a complex dance of knife and fork to soak their foutou in the sauce and bring it to the mouth.

Dessert consisted almost exclusively of fruits, ranging from mango and papaya to fruits that are much more common to the North American palate. This was mango season in West Africa, with the streets lined with ladies selling neatly stacked piles of mangos, papayas, and many other tropical fruits. Our meals, however, were usually finished with more "exotic fruits" in an African context -- especially apples -- which are quite a treat in that part of the world, much like a good mango would be here.