Cooking in Benin

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My grandma wrote me a letter asking two important questions: one, do I actually do any work? Or just show good will of Americans? And two, what the heck are couscous, telibo, akassa, ablo, pate noire, and pate rouge? Obviously, the more important question to answer is food.
Basics first: la pate. The direct translation is “dough.” Yum. Pate is made from corn. The corn is dried, and then ground into flour. This corn flour is what makes pate, with hot water and a lot of stirring. Pate rouge is made with corn flour too, but he water is the seasoned broth from the chicken or rabbit that goes with the meal.
Pate noir, or telibo, and even once I heard it as pate chocolate, is made in the same way, but with the flour of dried yams.
Pate-like substances can also be made from the non-dried versions of those same vegetables: akassa is dried corn that is re-hydrated before being ground. Boiled yams or boiled manioc can be pounded, using a mortar and pestle, into a very yummy carbohydrate base. Akassa is sweet tasting, and the pounded yams/manioc are similar in taste and texture to mashed potatoes. Ablo is another pate-like substance, and is one of my favorites. Do I say that every time? Because it is. Ablo is the flour and water mixture again, but a little more complex because there is sugar and yeast involved. The dough is placed in cleaned sardine tins, covered with plastic, and all sandwiched between mats of green leaves over hot water to steam bake. Very similar to corn bread, and absolutely satisfying with piment and dried fish.
There is also something called “come,” but I don’t know how to spell it, nor how it is made, and there are far too many jokes.
Couscous is a cereal grain called semolina. The Joy of Cooking cookbook says that couscous is the classic main meal in North Africa, similar to the role of pate in Benin. Couscous is really easy to cook, even easier if you don’t follow the directions in The Joy of Cooking: boil water, and then pour it over the about the same volume of cereal. Stir it a bit, and then let it sit to absorb the water. In Benin, the sauce is added to the couscous and mixed entirely before serving.
Rice and beans are the other main components of Beninese meals.
A sauce accompanies all of these bases. The base of a sauce is garlic, onion, hot peppers, salt, pepper, chicken bouillon, all ground very fine and fried/boiled in oil and water. Any combination of ginger, bay leaf, sesame seeds, greens, and/or tomatoes are added. The oils range from regular veggie, to peanut, to palm oil. My favorite sauce is a legume sauce, with a bit of cheese and maybe some rabbit.
The protein, aside from beans, consists of a lot of fish. Fish are the easiest, and a smoked one is very tasty. There are big ones and itty-bitty ones that you can eat like potato chips. Crabs and crawfish are good eatin’ too. Chicken is a common meat, and in Athieme so is rabbit. There is usually a goat or sheep every once in a while. Beef is even more rare, and is tender even less often. The absolute easiest is to go to the store and get sardines. Sometimes tuna. A good treat for us in the south is wagasi, or cheese. It’s the only type of cheese found commonly in Benin, and isn’t an especially tasty cheese, but is a cheese all the same. I like it.
As far as snacks go, there are all kinds of fried foods. There is fried bread; a sweet fried ball, a salty fried ball sometimes with a tasty morsel surprise in the center, and a hard ball that is sweet too. There always seems to be a new form of fried bread all the time, thin, thick, crispy, salty, sweet, etc. There are bean flour fried dough balls too, and those are one of my favorite. There are fried starches such as yams, sweet potatoes, and manioc, and fried bananas, or mashed fried bananas are especially excellent, and also banana chips. All fried snacks come with piment (except the sweet fried balls). I can also snack on brochettes, or shish kebobs, of beef, chicken, or mouton, all fried/grilled in a good breaded, spicy mixture. There is one snack on the way to Cotonou that looks like Vienna sausages, but is a bread-type substance; I have not tried that one yet.
Few people have refrigerators, and those who do, use them to make ice and yogurt and other cold things to sell. Sauces and pate, etc., can all be reheated the next morning to be eaten then, or reheated again later in the day to be eaten at lunch. The food loses its nutritional value, though.
Oh man, I am hungry now. I ate akassa for lunch, maybe some pate for dinner?

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