Fun with fufu

The national staple across much of West Africa is cassava. This unsuspecting tuber is combined with plantain turned into a gooey, flavorless glop of starch called fufu. Its relative solidity and texture can best be compared to, well, nothing pleasant.

And it’s no easy transformation. Women toil at this time-consuming task for hours every day, mashing away in a large stone mortar using a piece of wood as big as a fence post. Sitting on low stools, they bring this monster pestle down time and again until the contents are turned into a dense, creamy mass. Walk through a Ghanaian village or town and you are nearly certain to hear that metronome of hammering.

Eaten with the hand, fufu is not intended to be chewed, but, rather, swallowed like a clot of phlegm. To chew it, or to scoop it with a spoon, is to open oneself to the jeering and ridicule of your Ghanaian friends. It is akin, perhaps, to drinking your whiskey with a straw.

Fufu is served actually dropped into bowls of soup to sit like a goopy island in a sea of ground nut, palm nut or something called “light” soup, which is largely a vegetable broth. It’s intended to give some heft to the dishes, which at most include a few pieces of okra.

Aside from the obvious drawbacks of plunging your hand into a bowl of hot soup, it can be exceedingly hard to get to your mouth without some falling and splashing into your lap. And when you do succeed, it slides down your throat, landing in your stomach like bread dough dropped from a second-floor window.

It is, in short, not a dish for a first date.