Finger food

Papaya season is just starting - they're not hard
to eat with your fingers, but can be messy!

Here, eating "à l'Africaine" means eating with your fingers.  It's not just for chicken wings - under the guidance of my Ivoirian plumbing crew I have really expanded my finger food horizons.  It's a whole new world of etiquette but they're coaching me and progressively more food ends up in my mouth and less on my clothes.

It takes a bit of practice, and maybe some spare napkins, but this is definitely something everyone can try at home.  I bet your kids will enjoy it, and you'll have fewer dishes to wash, so it's ecological too!

First things first, wash your hands because you'll all be eating from the same dish.  At the restaurants they bring two little buckets of water to the table with a hand towel and either a saucer of laundry detergent or a bottle of liquid soap.  One bucket is to lather and the other to rinse.  You can just go to the sink though, a lot of restaurants have one or two at the back just for that.  In fact at a place we went to on Wednesday they said they weren't using buckets any more because of Ebola.

A fairly typical "maquis" or streetside restaurant/bar.
The sinks are along the back wall.

Use only your right hand, because the left has other, toilet-related responsibilities and nobody wants that in their communal plate.  Then just tuck in.  Take a handful of rice, squish it together in your fist or against the side of the dish with your fingers and then use your thumb to flick it into your mouth.  When you get comfortable with that you can try dipping it in sauce or pinching it against some cooked onions or chopped tomatoes.

Uncle Sam rice, imported from Thailand

The trick is not to take too much at a time.  I made that mistake at first, I thought I could eat rice like a fist-full of popcorn.  It wasn't pretty.  The main starches here are attiéké (a couscous-like dish made from manioc/yuca), and rice, although they gave us spaghetti at the Niger battalion camp where we were working this week.  The spaghetti was actually the easiest.  It was cut up and stuck together pretty well on its own.

For protein it's mostly chicken, which is easy, and fish, which is not.  The fish is generally served whole, possibly in a sauce, and you just reach in and tear off chunks of the flesh.  Be careful because it can be surprisingly hot, though for once it's your fingertips not your tongue getting burned.  Then you're supposed to work out the bones with your tongue and spit them discretely into a neat pile on the table beside your plate or, if outdoors, onto the floor.  They do the same thing in China, which was where a few years ago I learned that my spitting skills are nowhere near refined enough.  Here I play it safe at the restaurant by just taking the bones out with my fingers.  All my dinner table companions kindly ignore the faux-pas.

Bon apétit!

I haven't tried eating goat with my fingers yet,
but it can't be as hard as fish!