Of Grandmothers, Culinary Magic, and Nostalgia

(By Immanuel James Ibe-Anyanwu) – Grandmother hated maggi, no, “mmagi”, her term for all English condiments, which she said were invented to rig the cooking process. Yet she had her own cooking secrets: ogbamkpo and nwaurubiri, two types of dry fish without which she made no soup. Only the bones were laid to waste. The heads and skin, she would pound; and send the grain into the boiling pot to literally fish out incredible taste. 

The main fish, now rid of all bottlenecks, then plunges into the soup, filling it with true blessing. No meat or fresh fish approximates to the supremacy of nwaurubiri, Grandmother’s wise culinary vote. 

I once searched in Lagos for the pair—nwaurubiri and ogbamkpo—in my bid to restore the dignity of oha. Only twice did I find them. Ruined by urban touch, the Lagos ogbamkpo tastes like the bark of a tree. I eat the authentic one only when I visit the village. 

          Two more items sometimes helped work Grandmother’s culinary magic: otukwuru and onyenenkete, in my view the tastiest mushrooms on earth. I do not know the English names of these species, nor do I particularly care. 

Loosely translated, otukwuru means “the one that squats”—a fitting epithet for a short sprout that really never grows up. It buds through dark earth underneath leaves in the bush, leading quite a brief life. Perhaps there’s no point growing out vigorously if you will rot in a week, so the brown mushroom with a white stem chooses to squat. After all, growth sometimes compromises taste; “agric” chicken, for instance, can be ginormous in the same measure that it lacks the piquancy of the smallish, native breed. Taste can be more concentrated in smallness, at least for otukwuru. 

Not so for its colleague, onyenenkete, Grandmother’s other mushroom friend. Common on freshly burnt farmland, this edible fungus thrusts out with a thick white leg and a brown cap, looking like a penis. Meatiness, sweetness, vitality. The penile look manifests only when the mushroom is still young, before its cap spreads out into a flat cover over the stem. And it is tastiest at this penis stage, when a syrupy feel assists its urgent disintegration in the mouth. Never mind its bad name, patriarchy has been a good guy.

Said mushrooms are not available to the urban dweller far removed from Eastern Nigeria. But ogbamkpo, I shall soon eat. There was this soup Grandmother occasionally made with egwusi. I have forgotten the process, but the soup had no vegetable, only the egwusi in rough grains scattered all over her cream-colored achievement. Inside the illustrious soup was often benevolent ogbamkpo, its life and essence given to keep an old woman and her grandson happy. Chores were done without further delay once a promise of that offering was extracted. She called that soup “mgbamjijarara.” The best translation is that the soup is as elaborate as the sound of its name.

Today, this fish reminds me of Grandmother who, in turn, reminds me of mushrooms and soups absent from my dining table for over a decade. I wonder if there’s any mushroom farm in Nigeria and if there’s a market for it. Or are the gods proposing a business?