If the scary part of the Reality TV ‘Fear Factor’ is the food, then you haven’t ever seen anything yuck or tasted it for that matter. To a Rotik village native, that is mere hors d’oeuvre. The food considered delicacies in that part of the world ranged from weird to outright wacky.
Nothing excited me more than when asked by my dad to round up our young bulls to the crush nearby as he gave our kitchen knives some sharpening on the revered whetstone.( revered because it was said if you sat on it you became stunted and two, because it was a curse to break it. Thirdly, in case you had such a terrible stomachache, you lied with your belly on it and you were cured.)
When village boys are excited, they scream and ululate. That was us rounding the hapless bulls to the crush to be rid of their masculinity. I would have felt for them, but then, my appetites overwhelmed my pathos. A castrating specialist, our neighbor Mr. Baliach and our uncle Cheseret went about the business of tying up the bulls in the crush with routine ease as they whistled some non-existent tunes. Some things like castrating bulls or cutting the throats of animals during slaughter left me cringing but not these two. They never grimaced nor stopped talking and laughing during the whole exercise.
One after the other, the young bulls moaned in pain and peed as their masculinity were ended with aloof dexterity and thrown in a pan nearby. An hour later, six bulls were reduced to bullocks and left to absorb their pains alone. Two men worked on six pairs of testicles, washing, skinning and voila, we had six white balls ready for the saucepan. By a big shade in the cattle enclosure, a fire was lit and two stones placed parallel to form a hearth. I dashed home for salt and cooking fat. My brother darted to my grandma’s for onions and pepper.
When cooked, the white testicles turned a yellowish green color (bet it was the sperms that turned yellow) and that meant they were ready to be eaten. The testicled occupants of our household had an exclusive party of testicles! Not even a young girl could taste it. Women neither touched, cooked nor ate it. A taboo like no other!
When served on a bowl, the burst balls looked like mashed potatoes. There was something powdery about it but the taste was unimaginable! If all the rave I read about caviar in food magazines is true, then caviar might come close but not quite. If you think I am lying, ask someone who has ever had the balls to try it. Suffice to say it is the most sumptuous meal your money can ever buy!
With a big left-over ugali (a cake made of maize flour) on ma left hand and a bowl of balls on my lap, I relished my food in a savory quiet. When eating with my dad, I was better off quiet because I had no one to talk to anyway. After the food, a lecture from my dad would follow. First was where to graze our cattle that day and two on general behavior especially in relation to women. He would question us as to why we ‘’guffawed’ with women as if we didn’t know that women are bad people, my mom included. He would caution us to keep away from women so they could freely fart all they want. He would add a rider that if we enjoyed women farts, then we were free to hang around them. The sermon would end with that note.
After that, we would leave to the grazing fields with renewed motivation to herd and a futile attempt to keep away from women. The gospel hardly lasted a day for we reverted to playing football and leaving our herd to wander and of course be close to mom in the evening.
The testicles made us special and different from the female folk because they were eaten as brunches and during lunch we would still claim our share of the food. Unless a female cow was slaughtered, there was hardly any food that excluded men from partaking in it. A cow’s tits and vagina were the only parts that were exclusive to women.
I imagined the tits to be white with milk and thus taste yuck and the vagina to be slimy. Eating them was one boundary that my naughtiness never crossed. If the spasms of repulsion that the mention of cooked vagina and udder evoked in me were the same as what women felt at the mention of cooked testicles, then I am not surprised at all as to why they never even wanted to taste it. But then, I believe ours was tasty and theirs so yuck. I don’t know whether a bull’s dick was eaten. I am not talking about edible, of course it is! What I am not sure is whether there was a taboo against it. If there wasn’t any, then somebody might have cooked and ate it pink and whole like a sugar cane!
I hope you haven’t vomited yet because I am about to serve you your second course. If you lacked the balls to eat the first, hope you won’t miss the brains to eat this.
When a cow is slaughtered, I think it is only the skin that is spared. When all the other parts of a cow have been devoured and done with, the head is broken into two halves with an axe and the brains are extracted. The white matter with red veins connecting them when placed in a bowl looks like white clouds with impurities of blood. Wait till it’s cooked, they turn into meat spaghetti! Naturally salty and slimy. My elder brother would tease us that it was snot so as to scare us from eating the rare delicacy but who would be hoodwinked to leaving the rare food?
The skinned jaws and skull are hacked to smaller pieces, dipped in an earthenware pot and given a thorough boiling. Even the nose is never discarded. Eyes were the only organs spared the ordeal. When cooked it was added some wild vegetables and the pot-pourri was ready for the table. The meat always had a spicy smell because in most cases, the meat had stayed for more than four days and was almost decomposing. The smell of staleness added a unique flavor to the hotchpotch. My favorite part of the mixture was the rough palate, yummy! The head of a cow, goat or sheep make the best soup in the world. I won’t hesitate to gobble it if offered again, anytime!
The head of the house exclusively ate the tongue; of course I pinched it once in a while. Women again were exempted from this. It was rough in texture but soft to chew. I am tongue-tied trying to explain how a tongue tastes like. Suffice to say, it is yummy!
I hope you have not taken to your feet yet. Wait till you are sample even a foot.
The limbs of a cow, sheep or goat are the very last parts to be consumed. The hooves are cut off and the skin removed. Hard boiling in an earthenware pot follows. After three hours of boiling or so, you added your wild vegetables and salt. Tomatoes, onion, spices are not necessary, maybe some fat. Pepper is ok. After that, you repair to a table and have a meal of your life. Apart from the numerous colored hairs, floating in the soup, dinner would proceed without a hitch. A pepper may choke you but when all is said and done, you would have had a delectable meal. Please note that the meat is hard and muscular so watch out lest you knock someone else’s teeth off with your elbow trying to bite off some meat. Basically, you would have to do with soup and the rest goes to the dogs.
My friends from the neighboring tribe of Kissii would eat the heads and feet of chickens too but hey, we didn’t do it ourselves. I imagined a cock would crow in my stomach if I ate its head or would scratch me with its claws if I ate its feet. Our cowboy Peter, who was a Kissii would listen to my fears and still go ahead and boil the yellow feet and head, eyes seeing and all. Yuck!
I hope you are not naïve enough not to know that the first meat to go to the cauldron when an animal is slaughtered is its entrails. Everything in there inclusive of the dirt in the intestines. The soup is believed to be medicinal. You should taste the bitter soup; you will apply for a resident visa. I forgot to tell you that the bile is mixed with the black liquid dirt of the small intestines to make some bitter sauce called ‘churu’. When churu is mixed with blood and added to meat, it is a treat of a lifetime.
Or did you imagine that the blood of an animal is left to wet the soils? No. I warned you earlier that the only thing that is not eaten in animal is its skin. The rest is either eaten or drunk. I am sure if animals had a tear bank, those villagers would have found a way of consuming it. That I am sure they would.
A little blood is left to drip to quench the thirst of ancestors and the rest is collected in gourds. At breakfast it is added to tea. Yes. Added to tea! It tastes a bit salty but again it is tea. At meal time, when mixed with churu, you add it to meat and you get a bitter taste than pepper. This is the old men’s favorite. Old people drank the blood raw, red and steaming. Jesus!
Blood could be cooked in a flat earthenware pot called tabeet and eaten with ugali. It turned black and caked. This was my favorite. It tastes more delicious than anything else I have ever eaten. I won’t think twice before grabbing a bowl of it even now. God, I am drooling! Christians did not eat anything with blood but the population of real Christians was less than 1%. So this food had an overwhelming approval rating as the best food in the village.
Whenever a woman gave birth to a baby, heifers were rounded, tied and some blood extracted from them. Village men would get some special arrows, tie a heifer, and pierce a vein in the neck. Everybody knelt in that procedure. Women, as usual were banned. My dad would kneel by the hapless heifer with his arrow on the ready, tap on the vein a bit, pick some grass, throw at the heifer and release the arrow. I would look the other side as the arrow hit the vein at the same time holding the gourd that tapped the blood. I was wary of my dad observing this because cowardice is a crime in our community. I would stir the blood to avoid clotting till it form one round ball and some separate liquid. Some old men would eat the ball of clotted blood, otherwise called ‘nagetiet’ and swallow it raw. Just like a dog would.
The blood is then cooked and mixed with sour milk. After two days, a calabash full of the mixture would leave everybody belching out of satisfaction after an evening meal. It was so scrumptious it has even inspired some hunger pangs in me.
What do you do with a cow’s colostrums? Pour to the grass? No. it is a taboo to discard milk. (In fact you don’t hold a cup of milk with your left hand, always the right hand!) The first two days after a cow gives birth, the milk is poured to dogs. The third day up-to a week, the dogs are forgotten. The milk is kept in calabashes. After a week, it is mixed with cooked blood, stirred to mix properly, back to calabashes and after two days, you give out the surplus to neighbors and drink the rest. I am not sure whether I will taste this kind of milk again. Gosh! I feel like puking!
Even in ordinary circumstances, milk is never drunk white as it is. If you want it fresh, you make some coal from a special tree called ‘itet’, crush it inside a calabash with a bended stick called ‘sosiot’ into very fine powder called ‘wosek’. The process of crushing the coal into wosek could take thirty minutes or so. The screechy noise made by the friction of a calabash and sosiot threw us into a dance. Add to it the singing of my mom and we had a perfect orchestra. On a sad note, the hardened stick also served to knock your head in case you messed around when mom was cooking. One knock on your head was enough to silence the hard-headedness in you.
The milk is then poured into the calabash containing the fine black powder. When poured into a cup after shaking, you would have some black spicy milk. I miss this black milk! Alternatively, the milk could be left to ferment in a calabash for three days and the sour milk that will be formed would be blackish, granular and tasty and satisfying. Black milk? Yes! It is called ‘mursik’ and it is my favorite drink after beer.
The only issue I have with village food now in retrospect is the lack of variety. Milk and ugali is the constant but the rest is seasonal. If it is the season of pumpkins, then the meals were ugali, pumpkin and milk. You could eat pumpkin for lunch and supper for a whole two months. Same to a season of beans, kales, cabbages etc.
Beef was rare unless maybe you have visitors or it was December festivities or a drought. In droughts, many cows would succumb to it. You are mistaken if you think that a cow that dies out of hunger is thrown away. Why throw it away when people are hungry too? If a cow showed signs of succumbing to the drought, you slaughter it and sell it to neighbors. A phenomenon called ‘Soko Chogo’ translating to ‘a barn market’. Most of it was batter. You gave out some maize for a piece of meat. There were no weighing scales, the seller just cut a piece, weigh with his hands by juggling it and gave it to you. Most took it on credit to be repaid years later. Often, the beef was hard and would be cooked for hours.
Nobody died from these dead meats either. The vets were nowhere but an ant filled their place. You simply cut the throat of a cow, get an ant, if it eats it, it was safe from anthrax: the only fatal disease that could kill humans. The rest of the diseases that killed cows then were unimportant. A human being could get away with them all except anthrax.
The rainy seasons were eagerly awaited for all sorts of reasons. For us kids, it was for mushrooms. We collected all sorts of mushrooms during the rainy season and ate them by boiling or roasting. I miss a roast mushroom! In the evenings, we collected flying termites and roasted them for supper. Some gutsy fellows ate them alive!
My childhood stories though cannot compete with my mom’s experiences. For them, they ate ticks and grasshoppers. You pick a fat tick from a cow and place it in hot ashes till it explodes then you eat.
We got close though with the mole rats. We would pour gallons and gallons of water in their holes till they tried to escape out. We skinned, roasted them and oh! What a meal they made!
We also ate hares, aardvarks, porcupines, antelopes, birds and many other animals. The weirdest is a tailless monkey that used to make a lot of noise at night near our home that we woke up one day at 1 AM, killed it and ate it by dawn for breakfast.
Next time you visit me; I will treat you with tea mixed with animal’s blood for breakfast, fried balls for brunches, a sheep’s brains for lunch and a cow’s limbs and head for supper with a lot of soup. Bon appétit!
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