Celebrating this universal experience, Cooked Up, compiled by Elaine

Chiew, draws together authors from all over the world, each bringing
to the table a unique literary interpretation of the food theme.

These are mere glimpses into the rich variety of short stories (including
flash fiction) contained in this book a veritable treat for the senses
and an uplifting cross-cultural reading experience.

FICTION

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New Internationalist

New Internationalist
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Food fiction from around the World

A young man attempts to avoid military service by over-eating...

a woman re-enacts her husbands infidelities with fish bones...
students at a cookery school war over woks... a food bank visitor
gets more than she bargained for meals are prepared and
shared from Cambodia to an Indian kitchen in the US, from Russia
to war-torn Croatia.

Cooked Up

Food is our common ground, bringing together families, communities

and cultures. How we cook and eat can tell us a lot about ourselves.
Food can evoke memories good and bad; can be symbolic of where
we come from or where we want to be.

Cooked Up
Food fiction from around the World

Elaine Chiew Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Rachel Fenton Diana Ferraro Vanessa Gebbie
Pippa Goldschmidt Sue Guiney Patrick Holland
Roy Kesey Charles Lambert Krys Lee
Stefani Nellen Mukoma Wa Ngugi Ben Okri
Susannah Rickards Nikesh Shukla
New Internationalist

16/12/2014 11:39

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Walking the Wok

When my friend Daniel Chan confided in me that Jennifer

was leaving him because he was washing his wok with soap,
I laughed till I started to wheeze.
And when I came up for air it was to use the little
psychology I knew to assure him he was obviously displacing.
Jennifer could have left him for any number of reasons he
was too short, had a missing front tooth, and even though
only in his mid-twenties, was already balding. To his credit
he was an excellent chef, but he was considered a bit eccentric
because he exercised, which is to say he ran a mile every other
day. To all this Chan promptly responded, Fuck off.
The more I thought about it, the more improbable it
seemed that in a culinary school in a small town in Kenya
called Limuru, a soap-washed but clean-rinsed wok could
come between two lovers from China, and leave the man
ostracized from both his community and his adopted society.
It was not just Jennifer, Chan explained: his fellow Chinese
students were no longer talking to him, and African students
were eyeing him with suspicion, sometimes jeeringly and
sometimes sucking air between the teeth to voice the jeer.
A few days after Chans half-confession, half-lament, the
culinary students, chanting a few choice slogans like Fry
Chan and Walk the Wok went on strike. The riot police,
never having been called to this part of town to quell a strike
by culinary students, got lost, giving the students enough
time to raze Chans dormitory to the ground. We were all
sent home for two weeks.
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vvv

Mpishi Msanii College (which aptly translates as The Artist

Chef) rested in the outskirts of Limuru, on land donated to
the colonial government in the 1940s by Lord Baring, and
inherited by the African government in the 1960s. Lord Baring
carved the 10 acres from his 2,000-acre ranch, declaring that
Africa needed Africans with practical minds and practical
skills, like cooking.
So started the Lord Baring Native Cooking School, where
graduating from the three-month course in British etiquette
and cuisine assured students of work in country clubs and
the homes of various wealthy colonials.
With the wave of nationalization and renaming that came
with independence, or still-in-dependence as the witty
amongst the natives called it, Mpishi Msanii College was
born. The three-month course in cooking pancakes, fried
sausages, eggs and chips and broiled rabbit grew wings,
becoming an intensive two-year program that produced not
cooks, but cosmopolitan chefs well versed in local and global
cuisines.
The one thing that remained unchanged was a survival
course where each student was escorted blindfolded to the
middle of Ngong Forest and left there with a box of matches,
a machete and a Polaroid camera. The idea was to eat well
and efficiently no matter the circumstances. Some had
returned with Polaroids of wild boar, snake, hare and other
small game, served on plates made out of twigs and leaves. I,
for one, had quickly pounced on a baby deer which I roasted
to a perfect tenderness over a dry fig-wood fire. Mercifully,
and for no good reason beyond luck, no-one had ever died in
this rite of passage.
With that kind of dedication to student learning, Mpishi
Msanii College soon became one of the top culinary schools
in Kenya. Through tourists who ate in the five-star, big-city
restaurants that graduates worked in, the schools fame grew,
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attracting dedicated teacher-chefs and eager students from all

over the world. The student population comprised daughters
and sons of wealthy Africans who had failed to make the
grades necessary to get into their national universities and
had scaled down their dreams to become cynical and reluctant
chefs; Africans who really wanted to become chefs I would
like to believe that I fell into this group, even though I had
failed my university entrance exams and foreign students
from all over the world.
We assumed this last group to be rich, because they seemed
to have the best of everything personalized spatulas,
graters with fancy monograms, and silicon mixing bowls.
But it could be that one dollar when converted into a Kenyan
shilling was enough to buy you a Tusker beer, three loaves of
bread, a pack of cigarettes and some Big G bubble gum.
Students of each nationality naturally coalesced into
gangs, and Mpishi Msanii College was home to drunken
midnight cooking competitions that often ended in violence,
with singed hair and burns from boiling water and hot
oil. In this underground world, sabotage attempts ranging
from unscrewing salt-shakers to mixing a rotten egg in
the other groups flour mix were constant. But during the
day, dressed in our white coats, bandaged arms carefully
out of sight, singed hair tucked under our brimming white
chef hats, administrators and teacher-chefs would not have
sensed any discord.
Chan was a much better chef than I he had an
imagination that allowed him to combine disparate spices or
foods, as if he could mix and taste them in his head before
adding them to his pan. It was he who suggested adding a
light touch of curry, crushed garlic and black pepper to an
onion, mushroom, green and red pepper omelet. But, even
more innovative, he added eggplant. Biting into it while still
hot and juicy was like biting into different textures of spicy
tastes milky and crunchy all at once.
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His advanced skills as a chef, combined with gang loyalty

he belonged to the Chinese gang and I to the Kenyan gang
(which further sub-divided along ethnic lines unless facing
the foreigners) made our friendship improbable. But after
we ran into each other a few times at a den where the potent,
illicit brew Changaa was sold, we became fast friends.
In the den, no-one spoke English, so often the laborers
from nearby coffee plantations communicated with Chan
through hand-gestures and drunken nods. The end result was
that mutual curiosities, most of them pertaining to culture
and sexual prowess, went unanswered until I came along to
translate, earning myself an occasional free glass of Changaa,
as well as Chans trust and friendship.
Chan liked to unbutton his shirt and lie down on the
bench when there were only a few customers visiting, light
a cigarette and start asking questions, sometime regaling
us with stories of his own like how his parents were former
schoolteachers who lost their jobs during Maos Cultural
Revolution. Western tailored suits and dresses were found
in their attic. So he grew up poor, surviving mostly on rice.
But the more he thought about it, the more he realized he did
not have to eat plain rice he could add spices to it, spices
gathered from leaves and tree barks.
Always remember, necessity is the mother spice, he
declared as he waved a finger at his spellbound audience.
And so his rice became a gourmet meal until one day he
added poisonous bark and he had diarrhea for days. It was
then that he resolved to become a chef and turn his love into
a more forgiving science.
One memorable night Chan pulled a bottle of Coke from
his pocket and added a few drops to his glass of changaa,
getting rid of the brews bitter aftertaste. From then on, if you
wanted a touch of rum at an extra cost of one shilling, you
asked for the Chan Cham Rum.
The proprietor of the den, Madame, also had a running
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special, 10 shillings for a glass of cham, as we grew to call

the drink, and a small packet of githeri rolled in newspaper.
Githeri was a popular local dish boiled maize and beans
spiced with a bit of salt. But one day Chan drunkenly
observed, and I drunkenly translated, that githeri was the
most boring and unimaginative meal he had ever had the
misfortune of eating. As the clientele worked themselves into
a rage over the perceived insult, Madame challenged Chan to
improve the githeri, or the curse of our ancestors, who had
survived sieges, famines and droughts on this dish, would
fall upon him.
Chan asked for a flashlight, and ten minutes later, he
was back with an assortment of barks, leaves and grasses.
He ground everything into a thick paste, and tossed a pan
onto the cooking fire. He added a healthy helping of Kimbo
cooking fat and let the onions brown, adding the paste and
eventually the githeri. Chan earned everyones respect that
night. I suppose the survival course did come in handy.
vvv

Our Master Chef, an old Kenyan man who it was rumored

had been Lord Barings chef, instructed us through a mixture
of invectives and wise sayings like Do not play God,
Humility comes before the knife and fork, and his favorite,
To cook is to travel through cultures. So in our cooking lab
and white aprons we had traveled to France, Turkey, Japan
and Western Africa.
We had stopped by India where Master Chef started the
journey by saying: Indian food is like jazz, coconut milk is
the drumbeat, turmeric the bass, cloves the trumpet but
curry, he paused, looking up in the air in search of the right
words Curry is fools gold.
But it was while in mainland China that the troubles
started. There were three commandments that had to be
followed at all costs, Master Chef declared. Love your wok.
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Never wash your wok with soap. And oil your wok after each
use. We learned how to season the wok by roasting it over
open flames for an hour, sponging it with oil, then letting
it cool. We rubbed salt and black pepper over the surface,
and then fried sesame seeds. Soon, the smoke, sweet and
light with hints of stir-fry, filled the room. I watched my
wok transform from a glossy, buy-me-I-am-new shine to
a black, leathery, sandpaper gloss. After several hours of
seasoning our woks, we left them sitting on the counter to
cool overnight.
The following afternoon, after a morning spent with
Master Chef lamenting how nobody takes Chinese breakfast
food seriously because of the invention of white bread,
we made our first stir-fry dish. Nothing heavy, a little bit
of sesame oil, two tablespoons of oyster sauce, soy sauce,
minced garlic, onion, bok choy, carrots and broccoli poured
over short-grain white rice. It tasted good, but not unusually
good seasoning the wok didnt seem to make a difference.
We rinsed the woks with cold water, dried them with paper
towels, oiled them again and started the seasoning process
all over.
Then at the end of the week it happened and I understood
what Master Chef meant when he said that the wok, like
language, is also a keeper of culture. We prepared a simple
broccoli-based meal, yet it contained hints of past meals, rich
enough to be noticed, but calm so as not to overwhelm the
present taste. It was the old giving way to the new, or rather
the new recognizing its past, the original sauce still present
like an active ghost in the new sauce I had just made. Later
that evening while at Madames, it occurred to me that if we
could cook history, it would have to be with a wok.
I remember seeing Chans wok in class oil sizzling in a
bottom so discolored that it was metallic, the edges a thin
light blue that got darker closer to the top, the dark brown
wooden handle split from overuse. It was utterly unlike my
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wok, which had a spongy, even sooty inner surface. Chan was
clearly washing his wok in soapy water and, whats more,
scrubbing it clean with steel wool. Master Chef was pacing
up and down, agitated, shouting The Past is Prologue, To
love your wok is to let culture grow, It must have history
as he tried to correct Chan by reprimanding the whole class.
Still, I didnt foresee that Chans actions would later tear
the whole school apart.
vvv

When school reopened after the fire and we returned to a

brand new dormitory courtesy of the Chinese Consulate
in Nairobi, the first person I sought out was Chans exgirlfriend. Jennifer, though Chinese, spoke English with a
British accent. She was beautiful and clearly rich, but she
had some bohemian tendencies she liked to wear torn jeans
with beat-up white tennis shoes that during the rainy season
kept slipping off her feet and getting stuck in the mud, and
she liked to wear her long hair in a bun held in place with
two chopsticks. I had an inactive crush on her.
The wok changed Chan, she said when I asked her why
they had broken up.
The wok changed Chan? I repeated in surprise.
When he started cleaning it, he started forgetting his
culture. And I loved him because he was home for me, she
answered in a tone that suggested I understood what she
meant. I did not.
You really left him because of a wok? I thought I might as
well get to the bottom of it.
How can a Chinese woman be with a man who washes his
wok? She asked with a self-conscious smile.
I started to say something else but she stopped me.
I still love him, she said in a whisper. But he has to stop.
You are either Chinese or you are not, she added as she
stretched a long thin arm out of an oversized rainbow-colored
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sweater to squeeze my hand. I felt my heart flutter. It was

time to go before I started misreading things.
I was starting to understand. A wok in Kenya was no
longer just a wok; it was about finding mojo in a place where
you were different. Chan was just not being reflexive and
defensive enough. In his ability to synthesize and create, in
his fluidity, he was unbalancing everyone else.
vvv

After I left Jennifer, I walked through the famous Limuru

fog to come across a group of Chinese students smoking
up a storm of Marlboros behind the cooking lab. I had quit
smoking a few years before but I had to find a subtle way in.
Sco? I asked. Kenyan lingua franca demanded that I ask
for a sco, short for a score.
Inevitably I followed this up with Can I have some fire
too? Damn to be out of smoke and fire. The laughter
that followed, at once a chorus of different pitched coughs,
some low, some high, let me know I was in. Besides, this was
an opportunity for them to disabuse me of my friendship
with Chan.
The strike I started saying.
Its all about our culture, man. We are in the belly of
the beast Babylon never let dread-man grow. It was a
joke because everyone laughed at me I assumed but,
nevertheless, it was funny and I too joined in.
Culture I prompted when our laughter died down.
We are Chinese in Africa we are the ambassadors, said
a woman masked by the smoke and fog.
But Chan, he is one of you, I responded, sucking on the
cigarette and thinking of the impending re-addiction might
as well make it count.
He want to fuck the wok, instead of walking the wok, an
anonymous voice said, to more laughter.
Look, a more serious voice said, we are here, we eat your
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food, we drink your beer, we are here. But how can we really
know we are here?
But look, people, the wok, its not even Chinese everyone
in Asia uses a wok
Someone slapped the sco from my hand and slowly ground
it to its death.
In Africa, the wok is Chinese, a voice said, sounding
dangerous. It was time to wade some more in the fog. I had
one more stop.
vvv

At Mpishi College, there was only one place to find a

concentration of Kenyans and Africans. In spite of everything
we had learned about cooking, nutrients, dishes from faraway lands, African culinary students could always be found
at Wakari Nyama choma where, the owner claimed, roast
meat was an art. Take the African sausage, goat tripe filled
with all sorts of goodies he had a point.
So as soon as I walked in I knew what I had to do order
one kilo of the sausage and two kilos of nyama choma
rubbed with curry but just enough so that it was a hint to be
overpowered with fresh garlic and minced cilantro. The only
question I really had to answer was this: how the hell was I
going to give up this delicacy for information?
Look, man, Chan thinks he can come to Africa and do
whatever the fuck he wants. He is messing with our culture.
He drinks changaa and messes with githeri. Look, you dont
see me adding boiled maize and beans to broccoli, someone
summarized between mouthfuls of the nyama choma.
This is what it boils down to, I reasoned to myself: Jennifer
wanted Chan because he keeps her authentically Chinese, the
Chinese students want Chinese cuisine and traditions protected
and Africans do not want foreigners to mess with their cuisine and
traditions. In this collusion of interests, a strike was inevitable.
But what did Chan want?
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vvv

When I told Chan that Jennifer would take him back if

he stopped washing his wok, his reply was to suggest we
celebrate our return by visiting Madame.
After we were nicely drunk and he lay peacefully on a
wooden bench, I asked him why he washed his wok, and
with soap, when all his troubles could end simply by wiping
it clean. He did not say anything; he just lay on that bench
rubbing his belly like it was a genie bottle. Then he abruptly
ordered me to follow him to the cooking lab.
This, this will be something nobody has ever tasted
before, not even I, he said as he threw fat salmon skin into his
wok which he let fry until there was a nice ring of oil at the
bottom. I knew that was going to be in place of oyster sauce.
He skimmed off the now dry skin and scales and added
some garlic powder, paprika, crushed red chilies and diced
white onions to the oil. He turned up the flame and once the
sizzle started, he turned it down to sweeten the onion until
the sauce produced a musky sweet smell. He added some
fresh basil and dashed some soy sauce into the wok. The
sweet smell soon became a furious storm of clashing tastes,
bubbling dangerously like hot molten lava.
Chans movements were deliberate and steady like he was
keeping to the rhythm created by his hands and the fire. He
took some old rice and precooked lentils from the fridge and
started heating them in a pan. He added some raisins before
turning his attention back to the wok and the sauce, to which
he added peanuts and broccoli. When the peanuts started to
brown, he took them out and threw in shitake mushrooms.
Three minutes more and dinner was ready.
The food was a symphony of tastes, at once impossible
yet possible. The lentils fought the rice and raisins, and the
sweet onions tried to rise above the hotness of the crushed
red chilies, the oil from the salmon swarmed against the
peanut oil. The shitake mushrooms, cooked on the outside,
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but steamed in the inside, had a taste that did not exist in
my world until then a slippery crunch that gave way to the
softest of bites, and the broccoli, soft on the outside, was still
juicy and crunchy on the inside.
On my animated tongue the food was a galaxy of tastes,
each distinct and without the heaviness of the past that
infused the food we had been cooking. Put simply, it was as
god, or perhaps the devil, intended food to taste: naked and
in the present.
As we ate, or rather as I listened to what I was eating
and Chan the artist observed his audience of one, he tried
explaining. The soil in which things grow, that is the real wok.
I didnt understand and chalked it up to still drunken talk.
You know they will ask you to stop, I said as I washed
his wok with soap and hot water. He did not have to answer.
I knew why he would never stop. And he would never give
this up for Jennifer.
I understood. My eyes were open and I was feeling lighter
already. I too wanted to make dishes that were not prisoners
of the past. Right was on Chans side and as in a revolution,
we would win more and more people to our side one
liberated mouth at a time. And if we failed and were kicked
out of the school, so be it.
We had tasted the future.
Time to go back to Madames, Chan said as soon as I had
dried his wok on an open flame and oiled it with more of the
salmon skin. n

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