Maggi Cube & the Ghanaian Kitchen

Once several years ago, my father made a remark that I never forgot. “Ghanaian women these days do not know how to cook, just Maggi cube here, Maggi cube there, stew and rice, rice and stew, and they call that food”.

The statement was made around the time I was beginning to realise that the Maggi cube was a quintessential ingredient in the Ghanaian woman’s kitchen. I do not remember what prompted the outburst. I doubt it was me because I have not cooked for my father since there are always others to do that. But maybe it was ….

I of course think I can cook. But my father is one of those who returns home from work having eaten a Caesar Salad with soup or a sandwich for lunch and declares that he has eaten nothing all day. There has been nothing flavourful, nothing heavy, no banku, etc. You get my drift. I wasn’t going to get into an argument with him therefore as to whether cooking “rice and stew” was good enough to say one knows how to cook.

Indeed! When I was quite young, not yet ten, one of the stories my mother would tell me to demonstrate or rather insist that I should be in the kitchen with her was that of …

“a beautiful young woman who one day got married. Her husband went to work and asked her to prepare groundnut soup for supper. So she went to the market and bought groundnuts, chicken, and the ingredients
(Ghanaian code for pepper, onions, tomatoes +/- ginger, +/- garlic). She
came home, put everything in a pot of water, and placed it on the stove. The husband came home to a soup of whole groundnuts that had not even been roasted or deskinned floating next to whole onions, whole
tomatoes, etc. and with cuts of chicken that had not even been well cleaned. He said, ‘Ah, but what is this?’ realising that his beautiful prize wife could not cook. Immediately she was sacked and back to her family she went with great shame.”

No, that story did not inspire me to want to learn how to cook. In fact it angered me. Where’s the shame in returning to your family? Good riddance from a man who is likely to be a buffoon. Besides I already knew better than to put the ingredients into a pot and expect them to magically transform into soup.  After all, I had already received the lecture that I should know how to grind the ingredients by hand because in Ghana, my future husband may not have an electric blender. 

I questioned (to myself in silence of course) why all these stories relating to my domestication resulted in my being sent back to my family for I could not see the shame in that. Furthermore, I wondered how it was possible a grown man, an adult, could not cook food for himself. And then, I wondered what misfortune lay in my future that I would be married to a husband who could not afford a blender leaving me to the mercy of an asanka or grinding stone. For context, I was living in Germany during all of this.

I do not eat banku, so no I do not know how to slave over a pot on the stove turning and turning the fermented corn mixture into a gelatinous ball. I don’t have the bicep or tricep power for all of that!

I do not eat kenkey, Fante or Ga, so no I do not know how to pick the one that is “sweet” let alone make a ball of kenkey from scratch. That fermented taste is just not my cup of tea, though oddly enough I can and will make and eat koko and I’m developing a taste for Ethiopian injera.

Same goes with shitɔ, whether home-made or gasp, store-bought in a can or jar. At least this I’m trying to get a taste for. I’ve had a jar of shitɔ prepared by my mother about 3 years ago still sitting in my fridge. Hmmm, I suppose I should throw it out…

Now, surprise, surprise I do eat fufu, preferably plantain based, and preferably with ripened plantains. But how many times have I been afforded the opportunity to hit someone’s hand with the pestle let alone give someone the opportunity to hit mine in the pounding of fufu?

In either case it has been years since I ate fufu, whether pounded with a mortar and pestle or stirred in a pot on the stove. At this point I am loath to swallowing balls of fufu and have taken to chewing. Yeah, I said that. Let’s not even get into my cutting fufu technique – thumb and index finger
in action with all other fingers particularly the pinky up in the air. This when I’m trying not to use a spoon. Sacrilegious! Eating fufu with a spoon you ask? Listen people, I have come a long way from reaching into my plate with my left hand in deference to those around me. Leave me and my spoon-eating fufu manners be. But kidding aside, in all honesty, 95% of the times I’ve eaten fufu have been with my fingers…and I promise that’s mostly been my right hand.

Moving on.

Gari is a snack that is eaten with powdered milk and sugar. Dried fish need not make an appearance on my plate. Even fresh fish I supposedly waste because I do not know how to eat it properly according to my parents, leaving too many edible flesh on the bones. Meanwhile my dad will chew the whole skeleton, head and all, even in a restaurant.

If you don’t yet think me pretentious in my relation to Ghanaian food, let me help you out with a story. Shortly after moving to Ghana at the age of eleven, I found myself one day in a JSS One Life Skills class in the group that had drawn Mpɔtɔmpɔtɔ for the cooking session. I had no time to ponder over what cooking on a coal-pot would be like or how I was to use a fan to moderate the temperature. No! I was just horrified that I was to cook something that sounded so eww! M – poor – tom – poor – tor. I had no idea what it was. In those days when I would not touch “street-vendor waakye” (still dubious) or chofi (never will) even the word apapransa, a meal also unknown to me, sounded so much better and I was envious of the group that had that assignment.

The teacher, who had taken a liking to me, God bless her soul, when any
other person would have instructed me to come off my high horse saw how
disturbed I was by my assignment and tried to comfort me by saying that
mpɔtɔmpɔtɔ was “just Irish stew. It’s just Irish stew, KChie”. This did not help. “What on earth is Irish stew” I was left to wonder “and why would I want to eat that?!”  When it was all said and done however, I realised mpɔtɔmpɔtɔ was similar to mbɔteleba, an Nzema one-pot meal my mother had made one Sunday morning before church years prior that I simply refused to eat because of the fermented corn dough balls and the fish. I realised that if given the choice between the two, the mpɔtɔmpɔtɔ made from fresh cocoyam would have won hands-down! I chuckle now when I think about this incident and I daresay I wouldn’t mind having a plate of mpɔtɔmpɔtɔ today.

Speaking of Ghanaian cooking you know what else I have no shame about? Reaching for a dish cloth or oven mitt to lift a hot lid or take something out of the oven. My mother would look at me like I’m “something else”, me and my “soft hands”, but when did being able to burn your fingers repeatedly become a status symbol? I suppose if I cannot rearrange hot coals in the coal-pot with my bare hands I have not arrived at womanhood.

In either case, I’m very much a “rice and stew” and salad woman. No shame! Sandwiches even. Some might say that my not eating banku is no excuse for not knowing how to prepare it. After all, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And do not those non-Ghanaian women who marry Ghanaian men learn how to stir banku? To which I reply sure, when I marry my Japanese husband I may learn to cook yakitori or sushi for him because at that point I would desire to.

But thinking back to my father’s statement, it struck me then that I did not even qualify as a Ghanaian woman because the Maggi cube did not have a role in my “cooking”. However, after that statement, I started to pay attention and by golly was he right?! My jollof rice tasted less “bland” and more Ghanaian after I added the Maggi cube. My salad vinaigrette
“popped” after crumbling a bit of Maggi into it. Grilled tilapia tasted out of this world with a bit of Maggi-prawn crumbled into the marinade. Who knew a little cube could have so much power? But, but, I do not want to be a Maggi dependent cook.

Pray tell, did our great-grandmothers cook with Maggi cube? Our grandmothers even? How then did this Swiss invention infiltrate our kitchens and become the “must-have” ingredient for a Ghanaian cook? Nay, a West African cook? What is it that it is is replacing I wonder?

Dawa-dawa (fermented locust beans) most likely as this comes closest to providing that umami flavour that the MSG in Maggi cubes impart. Then there is dried crayfish/prawn powder. And lets not forget the stinky Koobi/momone (salted dried fish). Much to my chagrin grinding the ingredients in an apotɔ yewa (asanka) or on the stone grinder also imparts a flavour which the stainless steel blades of a blender cannot approximate.

Either way, I’m convinced that the Maggi cube is totally unhealthy. Salt, sugar, partially hydrogenated palm oil, monosodium glutamate (MSG), need I continue? Imagine putting that in every dish. On top of using salt. Eating that every day multiple times a day. I cannot. And while Maggi cube is what I’m familiar with, this diatribe extends to all the other seasoning cubes. They are all just a tad more than dehydrated stock.

No, I rather accept a status of “she cannot cook” than to put Maggi cube in every dish. I don’t even use seasoning salts like Goya Adobe anymore. I just make my own mixes. That said, I’m yet to go back to cooking Jollof rice without Maggi cube even though I make my own chicken stock as the base. I want to try dawadawa but I have no idea in what proportion it should be used since it wasn’t an ingredient my mother grew up with, it being from the north of Ghana. The struggle is real.