Mid-September through Mid-October
So I recall posting a while ago that I was absolutely
delighted to find out that making my own cheese was actually quite simple. I
love cheese. If I could eat one food for the rest of my (most likely very
short, due to subsequent high cholesterol) life, it would be cheese. I just
love, love, love it.
On one of my jaunts across the internet, I discovered that
by simply adding vinegar to milk, one can make cheese. Basically vinegar—or
even an acid like lime juice—separates the curds and whey (Hey! I know what
curds and whey are now! Little Miss Muffet makes so much more sense!) I haven’t really tried it over the past
year, because my fridge had been terribly unreliable. Once I tried it with
powdered milk. And it tasted like powdered milk. Ugh. And I don’t even buy the
good kind. Plus, there was one time that I did buy real milk, and all that
happened, was that it was really expensive, and gave me terrible intestinal
problems.
Now, there are a lot of Peul (also called Fulbe, Pulaar, and
Fulani) in Northern Benin. In fact they are spread out through a lot of West
Africa; there are even Peul in Senegal (my host brother, Aziz, is Peul). They
are so far spread out, because their traditional occupation has been—and still
is—herding cattle. This means, of course that they must be migratory. So
anyway, there are a lot of Peul villages around Kérou, and every day, women
walk into town to sell the milk. It’s weird for me, because they sell “today’s
milk” and “yesterday’s milk”. The milk from the previous few days, looks nice
and curdled, but people just add it to their porridge-looking meal, and eat it
right up. So I guess it’s safe? Safe-ish? When I bought the “today’s milk”
originally, a long time ago, it was a non-market day, and I bought it at this
area kind of close to my house. It cost me 60 cents for a half-liter (just over
2 cups), which Pierre said was really expensive. And I was disappointed,
because that meant it was almost as expensive as boxed milk (pretty much like
the gallon jugs we buy in the states, except this milk doesn’t have to be
refrigerated until the box is opened). But at $1.50/liter (that’s $5.68/gallon),
I decided it’s way out of my Peace Corps budget, for a regular basis.
So fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I finally went to
the actual 4-day market. There is always a group of Fulani women selling the
milk, and a girl there helped me explain what I wanted (the Fulani, living in
their even more remote villages, speak even less French than the Bariba). I got
my half-liter filled up for 40 cents, and that was overflowing! I was so
excited. I hurried home and boiled the milk, then added the vinegar, and VOILA!
Cheese! Not the creamy, American or Velveeta or Brie, but apparently like
Indian Paneer cheese or “Queso Fresco”. However, I wasn’t entirely satisfied,
because I kind of had this idea that the vinegar gave it this off-taste,
although it’s entirely possible that I was imagining that. Furthermore, I had
read in Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” (and no, that title is not an
exaggeration. It’s an incredible book) that cheese would be best made with
buttermilk.
So now I have a quest to find out how to get buttermilk.
Jumping to my handy-dandy new smartphone, I find out that a good buttermilk
substitution was milk and vinegar. WAY AHEAD OF YOU, but thanks. So fail.
But THEN, I stumbled across a website explaining how to make
butter at home. BUTTER. And—here’s the best part—when you make butter, what it
leaves behind is buttermilk. How perfect is that, RIGHT!?
Then I start thinking about how when I was young, my school
would take us to Rose Hill Manor, a historical plantation in Frederick. They’d
show us around, going, back in these times, people had to pop popcorn with
fire… “What, how do you pop popcorn without a microwave?” I thought at the
time. Now if I want popcorn, it’s over my gas stove. Then they’d show us sugar
cubes, saying that back in the day, people had their sugar imported from Europe
in cube form (yep, that’s what I get here in Benin! Sugar cubes by the box).
Another thing was a big container where people would let the milk sit, and let
all the cream rise to the top. Then they would skim the cream off, and throw
everything else out, because apparently skim milk is infested with demons, or
bad luck, or something. Then they would make butter with their fancy churn, and
so on.
So I’ve basically just accepted that I’m living in Colonial
America. I’m pretty sure my Uncle Ken said that on one of my blog posts almost
a year ago, but I was like, “Pffft, that’s ridiculous. People have cell phones
here. Cell phones didn’t exist in Colonial America. Check. Mate.” So I think
for the first time ever, I will admit to my uncle that he was maybe a little
bit right. I am living in Colonial America. With a smartphone. :) I mean, it’s
way, way more complicated than that, especially from a development standpoint.
Because it’s not the Benin is UN-developed, it’s that it’s been systematically UNDER-developed
to the benefit of Western nations. So when I say I live in Colonial America, I
don’t want you to get the impression that given a few hundred years, Benin will
begin to look like Modern America. Development isn’t linear, and Benin is
stunted in its development because of its historical and current (economic) relationship
to the rest of the world. I think that’s really, really important to remember.
But I guess in terms of living conditions, there is a lot that is the same,
such as lack of indoor plumbing, a large focus on agriculture, farm animals
everywhere, dirt roads, food so much more dependent on seasons… OH, and I
remember reading in Felicity’s (the American Girl Doll from Colonial Times) book
about her playing this game with a wooden hoop, where basically, you use a
stick to push and guide the hoop as it rolls and you run along beside. And
guess what? So many kids here do that!!! (except with more modern bike tires or
something) It’s so bizarre.
[On a somewhat related note, I wrote to my grandmother, GW,
about my intentions to make butter, and she wrote back that she actually
remembered her mom skimming the cream from milk—delivered by the milkman—and
making butter. So I guess this means my grandmother actually lived in colonial
America too. She’s definitely aged well, considering.
(Hmm…delivery. I should get some economic development going,
and teach Peuls about the beauty of home delivery. Everyone could have fresh
milk at their door every morning…)]
It is interesting, though, to think about the different
foods that developed here versus Europe/America. I was talking with a German volunteer,
and we discussed how the reality of having winter meant that we had to develop
ways of storing food… from sausages to canning, drying, and excessive uses of
salt etc. Whereas here, technically one can grow things all year-round…as long
as you have some sort of water source. On the other hand, with all this heat,
it’s much harder to preserve things. I remember also from the Rose Hill Manor
that people—obviously, this is only people rich enough to have a “manor”—would
build a huge cellar, and then in the winter, cut out chunks of ice as the
lakes/etc froze over, and put the ice in the cellar, so it was like one huge
fridge, that would at least last through most of the summer. Clearly, that’s
not an option here. But there are some projects that are trying to encourage
more preservation. One volunteer was working on mango-drying, which would
preserve the mangos that are so plentiful during their season that many of them
go bad before they can be eaten. There was also a project through the Beninese
government that taught this woman in another village down south how to can
tomatoes. Tomatoes are really ideal, because they are so acidic, you don’t need
much fancy equipment to can them, just plenty of boiling water. Her main
problem was, however, that when she made and canned tomato sauce, people didn’t
buy it because it wasn’t the bright-barnhouse-red color that tomato sauce is
when you buy it in the cans from China. So there’s that…
ANYWAY, so on to my actual attempts at butter. I went and
bought 1.5 liters of milk—that’s a standard water-bottle here. It’s a little
less than a half-gallon, and cost me $1. I brought it home and boiled it.
(Apparently cows can have tons of bacteria in their milk, including stuff that
can make you have diarrhea, to stuff that can kill you. So yeah, I’m gonna boil
all that milk.) This goes along successfully, and then I let it sit and cool
for a while, before putting the milk into glass jars I’d cleaned out. I let
them sit out on my counter for a while. It’s weird, because I’ve always had
this strict idea that milk can absolutely not sit out for a long time, but I
don’t think that’s entirely accurate. In the same way that people here never,
ever refrigerate eggs, and they’re fine. I think there’s something about milk
being pasteurized that requires it to be refrigerated… I don’t exactly know.
But people in Colonial Times (currently my official go-to indicator) obviously
didn’t refrigerate milk, so I think this milk would be fine. But I eventually
gave into my indoctrination of milk needing to be cold, and put it all in my
fridge.
I pulled it out the next day, and skimmed off the cream.
Which turned out to be a very disappointing amount of cream, for all the milk I
got. I was assuming half-ish of milk/cream, but only got a few tablespoons
worth of the cream. The method for making butter that I read about was to put
it in a jar and shake that jar for a while. So I did. I shook, and I shook and
I shook. I looked like one of those people on the “shakeweight” commercials. It
was very hard on my muscles, so I couldn’t keep it up for long. But over the
course of the day, I probably shook that jar for a good hour total. And it just
wouldn’t do it. I had this stupid cream—I actually managed to make whipping
cream—but I couldn’t get the butter to separate. I started throwing the jar
back and forth between my hands like one might a baseball. “JUST TURN INTO
BUTTER!“ I yelled at the cream, but to no avail. The moral of that story was
that I never got butter, but all of the muscles in my arms, shoulders, and
upper-back hurt for the next 3 days.
I looked on my smartphone, and found a bunch of answers—some
contradictory to each other. But the basic recommendation was that I should use
cream that has actually sat for a few days—not just one. And it should be at
room temperature—just not too hot. It recommended that I store the milk in a
“cool room” and I think I laughed at that one for a while. Every single room I
have is hot. I don’t have a cellar, sorry. And, oh yeah, I live in Africa. In
the Sahel, just south of this huge desert you might have heard of, THE SAHARA.
So I planned on getting more milk and trying again. Letting
the cream rise for a longer period of time, etc. So I went to the market and
got some more milk, and put it on my stove. Then, the milk curdled right in
front of my eyes! “NOOOOOO!” I yelled at the milk, which of course didn’t stop
it from curdling. It actually worked out alright, because I basically created
my curds and whey, so I strained out the whey, and had my cheese all ready for
me, without any other steps. But this kind of ruined my long-term plans. I
looked on the internets to figure out what went wrong, but basically every
website said, “You’re dumb, you can’t curdle milk just by boiling it.” Umm, I’m
sorry, but it just happened. I witnessed it. Wait! OMG I’ve broken the laws of
milk-physics! I did finally find one site, though, that said one can curdle
milk by boiling it too “vigorously”, whatever that means. But maybe they are
just crazy, along with me. Plus, other sites informed me that whey can actually
produce cream as well, which you can make into whey butter—different from the
normal “sweet butter”.
This just makes me feel like milk is one of those dolls that
never end, but just gets smaller and smaller. Like you start off with milk.
Then you siphon off the cream. From that you make sweet-butter—and buttermilk
(or just whipping cream if your cream is stubborn). Then you can take the skimmed
milk, add the buttermilk, and voila! Cheese! But wait, there’s still whey left
over. If any cream is still around from the whey, then you can make whey-butter.
And from the whey, you can also make ricotta cheese! (Ricotta, apparently means
something like “twice-baked”) But then there’s still whey left from that… can I
make ricotta-ricotta?
It makes me wonder why humans are naturally programmed to be
lactose-intolerant after infancy. Technically, only societies that developed
strong herding industries—such as in Europe and West Africa—developed
lactose-tolerance for the duration of their lives. But then I realize that the
things milk makes—butter, cheese—are actually kind of bad for you. As in
clog-up-your-arteries-and-kill-you bad for you. WHY IS LIFE SO CRUEL??? Haha. I
wonder, though, if maybe making things myself makes it healthier. Butter, I
think it doesn’t matter. It’s cream that’s been shaken around. (Although
apparently whey-butter has a lot of protein in it.) But if I skim off the
cream, and use THAT to make my cheese… No, it’s not the melty-gooey kind of
cheese. But that’s probably the point. I do kind of like the whole idea of not
having so many processed items in my cheeses food as well. I’m not sure how
that will work out back in the States, though. It’s not like I can find
straight-from-the-cow milk for $2/gallon. Also, pretty sure “raw milk” is
illegal in many states. Not that I’m objecting, because it’s not like I would
particularly enjoy getting sick from milk. Although if I don’t get sick from my
boiled raw-West-African-milk, then I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine. Whatever.
So after these attempts, I had to make trips to Natitangou,
then Cotonou (for a little medical checkup. The doctors say I’m doing fine,
considering). When I get back, I decide to start this whole thing up again.
This time I bought the 3 liters of milk again—about $2. I come home, heat it up
on the lowest heat possible. Then I put it in this large metal bowl and let it
sit out covered overnight until it comes back to room temperature (and, not
this does not comply with Pasturization standards, sorry I can’t make and ICE
BATH to cool down the milk in Africa.) After that I put it in the fridge for
two days.
I finally pull it out, and there is this glorious hunk of
cream floating on the top. I probably had between 1 ½ and 2 cups of cream!
So I pull out this hand-cranked food processor I bought ages
ago. I mostly got it for the blades, with intentions to make peanut butter. It
turned out, however, that it didn’t exactly have the strength to make nuts into
butter. However, I have used it to make delicious tomato sauces, or even
smoothies, when the current decides to go out, rendering my blender useless.
BUT, the most important part is that this food-processor
also came with a device to beat eggs. At first I was like, “This is so stupid,
just use a fork…” but after my butter-jar fiasco, I realized that I could
actually use this as a churn!!!!
So, I pulled out the cream, and plopped it into my
repurposed egg-beater. And I began to whisk around the beater. It was just whipped
cream, then it started to get really hard to turn. “This is it!” I think to
myself, recalling the various websites that said the whipped cream becomes
really hard to shake/churn JUST BEFORE it turns into butter. Then I feel the
beater become easier to move, and let it swirl around a few more times before I
open the lid.
And lo and behold, I open the lid and see gobs of white
things swimming in what looks like skim milk. However, I ask myself, “Is this
really it?” WHY DOESN’T IT LOOK BRIGHT YELLOW, AND IN SQUARE FORM???
(Apparently, Jersey cows are more likely to produce yellow-looking butter than
any other cows) Plus one place I read said the butter/buttermilk should be
about 50/50, and this definitely had way more butter than buttermilk. And I was
expecting the buttermilk to look more like whey. So I reason I’ll give the
beater a few more rounds, just to have everything properly separate.
But, as the butter gods apparently hate me, what actually
happened (according to the internet) was that I beat it so much the butter and
buttermilk came back together, and (again, according to the internet), this is
something that cannot be undone. So there might have been stamping of feet and
gnashing of teeth, plus a few choice words screamed out at my place today.
So once again, I am left with whipping cream, and nothing
scrumptious like strawberries to dip in it. Le sigh.
So that’s my milk-adventures up to now. Tomorrow is market
day, and I shall be buying more milk and trying again. ONE DAY, this girl will
have officially made her own butter. I mean, I guess I technically have
already… but whatever.
All of this culinary makes me really, really wish that I had
paid a little more attention to my dad cooking. I always had aspirations for
him to show me things, and he always agreed. But I was always very lazy about
it. I guess I assumed he could always show me later. Actually, right after my
dad’s death, my grandmother—Nanny, his mom—came over to my house to show me the
recipe for my favorite dish of hers when I was growing up (a pasta/Velveeta
casserole). And she sent Velveeta cheese to me, all the way in Benin, and I
made it. It was so good!
But I never asked my dad if he did things like make butter
or cheese, or if he watched his mom do it. From what I’ve seen on the
internets, home-cheese/butter making died off in the 50s or so, so he might
have missed it. All I remember about my dad and milk, was that my mom, my
sisters and I all drank skim, but I think he saw Skim milk as an affront to
life or something. As in it was just water colored white, and if you’re gonna
drink milk, damn it, you should drink whole milk.
But more than that, I wish I had paid more attention when he
was showing me how to cut meat off a bone. I was always terrible at that. (BUT
DAD, I can get boneless chicken in the supermarket, duh.) Maria and I had quite
the time when we had—I think—Turkey meat, and attempted to skin it and then cut
it off the bone. We both just kind of looked at the meat, our knives, started
hacking, pulling, etc. Then after a bit we both look at each other and go,
“yeah, neither of us knows what we’re doing, do we?” Then there’s the whole
cow-meat issue. I have SOME knowledge from my year working at Outback
Steakhouse. I kind of know what a sirloin, tenderloin, porterhouse and t-bone
steaks are (approximately). But now Maria and I sometimes plan special meals
that involve beef. And we have to figure out which parts to ask for, and how to
ask for them in French. I think we spent an hour trying to figure out
“tenderloin”. Turns out it’s called, “REAL filet”, vs. a shortloin—an Outback
steakhouse’s “Victoria’s Filet” or a “filet mignon”—which is called a “False
filet” in French. I think. I’m actually still confused by this. I’m sure my dad
could have very easily explained anything dealing with cow-meat and steaks. Or
fish. Of course I can only get whole fish here. So I successfully managed to
scale it. But I didn’t realize how the scales would fly everywhere—I’m still
finding scales around my house. Then I tried to gut it (that basically worked,
but GROSS) and filet it. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. I gave up and just
shredded the fish, and pulled out as many bones as possible. Luckily
Maria—being from an island (Puerto Rico), and having once dated a
fisherman—actually knows how to filet a fish, so I think she’s going to show me
one day.
I did have one major culinary success, however. Maria was
actually lucky enough to be at the workstation when one volunteer who was
COS-ing (stands for Close of Service, basically, they were leaving), and this
volunteer left a hand-cranked meat grinder! We can have ground meat! Amazing! I
don’t even generally eat meat anymore, but I still love me a good occasional
hamburger, etc. Anyway, we decided we were done trying to figure out what the
heck to call the pieces we needed (apparently, certain cuts like the brisket
and chuck make better ground beef), and just go for whatever. Which was lucky,
since when I arrived, all they had left were the hips, or whatever your would
actually call that in proper cow-terms (Round?). So we got that, and made chili
with a side of mac n cheese, and it was delicious! I think next we’re going to
make beef tacos, so I’m super pumped about that.
Actual Work
So I really do things besides just cooking. Although most of
my work can be summed up in: “Le sigh”.
I turned in my grant for the irrigation system. However,
with all the delays, there was not enough time to review it before September
25, which is the cut-off date, so Peace Corps can process things for the fiscal
year. September 26 I learned this, and subsequently learned that actually Peace
Corps is upgrading to a whole new system for submitting grants, which requires
all the work to be done online, making the spreadsheet I turned in useless. Oh,
and the government shutdown means that I have to wait even longer for this
submission form to be ready. So le sigh.
I did, however, get the chance to stop in Parakou on my way
to my mid-service medical exam. And I searched around until I was brought to a
vetrinarian, who can order baby chicks for me, vaccines, and all the stuff for
making feed we would need for healthy chickens. This is super-exciting. I’m
basically ready to turn in this grant now. Except I have to wait for the first
irrigation grant to be submitted, approved, and all finished (they are both Food
Security grants, and thus I can’t have both of them going at the same time). So
le sigh.
However, I do have one grant-funded project going! It was
actually a program a former volunteer (Thomas) had done with one of the
teachers (Constant). It’s a handball tournament. They did one last year, and
now we’re doing a new one. Basically, we have a tournament between the four
main schools in Kérou. There is both a girls and boys tournament. The teams
play back to back, so the opposite gender is there to root on their classmates.
Between each match, there is a little time where we discuss issues, this time
mostly related to gender and gender relations. For example, the first theme is
“Girls in Sports”, where we talk about why it’s important for girls to play sports
as well as boys, and what BOTH sexes benefit from the inclusion of girls. We
will also talk about sexual relations (if it’s a good idea to start them when
still in school), STIs and AIDS, sexual harassment in schools (a huge issue
here; teachers sometimes coerce their female students into sleeping with them,
and while illegal, this isn’t strictly enforced), and various issues that block
the success of girls in school and in work, etc. It’s really fun, actually. I
get to watch high-school games. It’s a reminder of how people of every culture
can be the same underneath. The girls roll and tie their shorts and tops to
make them tighter and more stylish, just like all the girls on my sports team
did. They cheer on the boys with various chants. The boys seem too cool to lead
girly chants, even though their teachers keep telling them to support their
classmates. Both sexes stand on the sidelines during the games, discussing with
each other and watching. They clap and jeer and yell “oh!” The teachers/coaches
yell advice, which the players promptly disregard, (“Slow the game down! SLOW
IT DOWN! Slow—oh come on!”).
Except for the first week, I have chosen a different team to
lead the in-between-game discussion, so it’s not just me preaching to them. I
went to one school this week, so they could prepare a poster and some ideas. I
am excited to see how this works out this Saturday!
My Savings and Loans group is coming along. I printed out
individual books where they will get stamped every week they pay their group
fee/savings. I also printed out a whole group of papers that essentially make
up and accounting book, filled with fees/savings, expenses, fines, loans, and
the final “Account Totales”. The idea is to keep blank copies of these; then
every year they can go and make more copies, and fill those in over the year,
so it keeps going even without me and my computer.
Still, trying to make people understand all of the concepts
is difficult. And I’m worried that if someone makes a mistake, they wouldn’t
know how to go back and fix it, or even how to figure out what the mistake is.
For example, in just the two meetings I missed, they already added things
together wrong, which I caught by just adding things together in my head. By
head-math seems to be impossible for people. (I think this is sometimes due to
the school, which puts may more emphasis on memorization, then being able to
look at any set of numbers and add them; or so I’ve been told.) And everything
just takes SO. LONG. The totals, done at the end of every meeting should take a
total of maybe a whole minute, but actually takes 5 or 10.
So, yeah, things are still chugging along. At a very
Beninese pace.
