#11 Uganda
- Jen
- Mar 28, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
“Uganda is a fairy-tale. You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the end there is a wonderful new world...Uganda is truly the pearl of Africa” – Sir Winston Churchill, 1907.
“The only tasty thing I ate in Uganda was a chapati…and a Snickers.” Carly Jane Paisley (née Mellor), 2020.
Churchill must have been talking about the Uganda Railway. Classic Empire: the Brits built a 660 mile railway from Mombasa (now Kenya) to Lake Victoria around the turn of the 20th century using workers shipped over from India. Like with all major historic construction projects, causalities were high; unlike all major historic construction projects, several of the causalities associated with this project were eaten by lions!
Carly must have been enjoying the local Indian-influenced cuisine, a hangover from the Empire days when the Brits transported people around the world to build their railways for them.
Food
Ugandan food is heavy in starch in the form of beans, potatoes and cornmeals, and also includes plenty of banana, cassava and peanuts. All the usual farmyard suspects are eaten but not in great quantities.
Typical Ugandan dishes:
· Groundnut sauce, aka g-nut sauce: peanuts ground into a sauce, seems to be served with almost everything.
· Luwombo: may be the national dish. It’s a stew made with meat (chicken, beef, goat), veg, smoked fish and g-nut sauce, wrapped and steamed in a banana leaf.
· Matoke: actually, I think this is the national dish…unfortunately. This is a type of green banana that’s eaten steamed and mashed alongside many dishes. Yep, usually with a ladle of g-nut sauce.
· Posho: cornmeal. Tasteless calories but calories all the same. Served with soups and stews.
· Rolex: veggie omelette wrapped in a chapati. Maybe Carly had one of these.
· TV chicken: so-called because the rotisseries it’s cooked on apparently look like TVs. Served with French fries. I reckon you can get chicken and chips in one form or another pretty much anywhere on Earth.
· Mandazi: like a doughnut but with no hole, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.
· Grasshoppers: fried and sold at roadside stalls.
Jen's Kitchen Hell
You’ve probably concluded by this stage in the game that I’m not fussy when it comes to food; I have high standards but I like a decent version of most food items. Most. I’m going to let you into a slightly shameful secret: bananas are my nemesis. I cannot stand the smell, the taste, the noise the flesh makes when people chew them, touching the flesh gives me the same cringy shudder as nails down a blackboard and I don’t even really care for yellow as a colour. That’s all five senses assaulted. This mild phobia extends to plantains too.
It’s quickly becoming apparent as I’m working my way around the world for this blog that bananas and plantains are a staple in way too many of the developing and tropical places. They’re grown in 135 countries! If I have an embargo on all musae I could be ruling out all sorts of potential for culinary discovery.
As matoke seems to be a firm favourite in Uganda, I’m just going to be a grown-up about this and face what would be my Saturday Kitchen Hell…if I was ever invited on the show.
Luwombo and matoke
Luwombo is eaten by rich and poor alike. It was invented in the 1880s by Kabaka (King (of Buganda (region of Uganda))) Mwanga’s chef. KM had 16 wives…so perhaps this dish is an aphrodisiac. I’m going to be careful who I cook this for…
Omg…this guy’s father had 85 wives! Lad.
My version of matoke is going to be nothing like actual matoke. Plantain would have been a sensible substitute but beggars can’t be choosers in COVID-19 isolation so it’s an everyday eating banana, but I’m going to add a little knob…no, screw it, half a pack of butter to give myself a fighting chance of forcing this down. Even if I’m still gagging at the taste at least I’ll have lubed it up so it will just slip right down.
I opted for braising steak pieces and smoked haddock for the luwombo. I browned the meat first and then fried some onions and added a chicken stock cube, tomatoes, mushrooms, ground peanuts (the Nutri-Bullet strikes again) and the haddock. I splashed some water in and simmered for a few minutes until it became a thick, peanutty sauce. I packaged up the meat and sauce mix into tin foil parcels and steamed for a couple of hours. I blitzed the banana in the microwave and mixed in butter to saturation point.
Luwombo: What’s not to like? Smoked haddock good, peanuts good, beef gooooood. Genuinely enjoyed it. If I made it again, which I’d say is unlikely but you never know, I’d probably put some curry powder in as it had the consistency of a nutty Indian curry.
Matoke: Yep, still hate bananas, even with butter. I was fairly disappointed that my coronavirus symptoms didn’t include the loss of taste at this point.
I made two little packs of luwombo so I can have it again for dinner tonight. Waste not want not during lockdown! I’m having it with chips later though; I’m socially distancing from bananas!
From Uganda to MOROCCO (when the travel ban is over)!
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