High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [6]
Park also spoke of rice dishes and of corn puddings and of the fact that there were a wide variety of vegetables. Fowl was abundant and included partridge as well as guinea hens, which are indigenous to the continent.
Like Ibn Battuta, the explorers were amazed by the lavish hospitality that was offered by rich and poor alike to guests and visitors. René Caillé, who traveled overland from Morocco through Mali into Guinea, spoke of the foods he ate in his 1830 travel account. He mentioned a “copious luncheon of rice with chicken and milk,” which he ate with delight and which filled the travelers for their journey. He also recounted a meal offered to him by the poor of a village, which consisted of a type of couscous served with a sauce of greens. While Caillé enjoyed his copious meal, his hosts made due with boiled yam with a saltless sauce. Similar prodigious hospitality garnered commentary from virtually all writers. However, some of the more gastronomically inclined French travelers, like Caillé and others, were as astonished by the sophisticated tastes of the food as they were by the generous hospitality. Theophilus Conneau, another Frenchmen, recorded that on December 8, 1827, he ate an excellent supper. It was
a rich stew which a French cook would call a sauce blanche. I desired a taste which engendered a wish for more. The delicious mess was made of mutton minced with roasted ground nuts [or peanuts] and rolled up into a shape of forced meat balls, which when stewed up with milk butter and a little malaguetta [sic] pepper, is a rich dish if eaten with rice en pilau. Monsieur Fortoni [sic] of Paris might not be ashamed to present a dish of it to his aristocratic gastronomes of the Boulevard des Italiens.
This was high praise indeed from a Frenchman.
Ibn Battuta, Park, Caillé, and others like them also visited the courts of African rulers and commented on the grandeur that attended the sovereigns. Mansa Kankan Musa of Mali, ruler of the region that Battuta visited, was so extravagant in his lifestyle that when he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, he distributed such quantities of gold that in his wake the Egyptian dinar was devalued by 20 percent. Leaders of the Akan, Fon, Bamiléké, Bamun, and Yoruba peoples and other coastal kingdoms equally impressed early European arrivals with their wealth, the splendor of their courts, and the ceremonies and rituals surrounding food and food service.
Christianized Anna Nzingha, and also known as Dona Ana de Souza, the seventeenth-century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms was an absolute sovereign. A lunch in her court, as recorded in 1687 by João António Cavazzi de Montecúccolo in Descrição histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola, was a finely tuned show of prestige combining African and Westernized customs. The queen, in her usual manner, was seated on a mat surrounded by her ladies and ministers. Her meal was served in vessels of clay, although she owned silver ones. When the food was served, it was piping hot, and the guests ate with their hands, passing the food between their left and right hands until it cooled off. Cavazzi, an Italian priest who was in attendance at court, once counted eighty different dishes being served. When the queen drank, all those present clapped their hands or touched their fingers to their feet to indicate that she should enjoy what she was drinking from her head to her toes. She ate in great pomp, and the leftovers were given to the rest of the court.
The pomp of the African courts amazed the travelers, but they also commented on the elaborate