30 Days of Stew: A Naija Wife’s Reflection
By: Tdo Timothy
Tags: Foreign Marriage, Cooking, Lovestory, Black Love, Naija

30 Days of Stew: A Naija Wife’s Reflection

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Without gari and stew, I can’t be full.

That’s my Nigerian husband. I knew that he would bring his food culture with him to the US when we married, so I started practicing early: memorizing Nigerian recipes, following Flo Chinyere and Zeelicious Foods on YouTube, experimenting with Semo.

The African-American adages about food are African after all. Naija sisters will tell you. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. A good man deserves a good plate. And if you don’t feed him, another woman will.

I could just hear it in my mind: “If you don’t feed him, another woman will…”

So I was practicing, and for what I felt was a long time while my husband’s Green Card was processed. It was more than a year before he received the USCIS’s all clear and put his feet down on US soil, finally home with his fully pregnant wife and a baby eager to be born less than a week later.

But back to the food. For my first at-home Naija dish I decided to do rice and stew because this felt natural to me. I was raised on my great-grandmother’s stews: tomato, tomato and okra, chicken. And I figured this stew… with a tomato base familiar to so many traditional Nigerian dishes… had to be perfect and respected in my house if our relationship had any hope of survival.

The Shopping

My husband did the shopping with me. Roma tomatoes. Tomato paste. Red and green sweet peppers and habaneros. Knorr bouillon cubes. Yellow onions and garlic. Salt and pepper. Spicy yellow curry. Red palm oil. Canned mackarel and salmon as substitutes for Nigerian fish. Spinach as a substitute leaf.

Preparation to Win

I had seen it a hundred times. Put the red oil on to heat. Cut the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers into rough quarters… blend until you get a course pulp. Check the oil for a shine to get the right temperature. Drop in the pulp and season with salt, pepper, bouillon, and curry. Stir to incorporate the tomato base and the oil. Cover and cook for 25 minutes. Stir every 5–10 minutes.

Cook the fish separately in its own seasoning blend. Incorporate fish and some broth into the fried tomato stew (which is now thick and aromatic). Add tomato paste if needed for color and thickness. Let them cook together for 10–15 minutes.

Give the spinach a wash and rough chop. Add it into the well meshed stew and fish. Cook for 10–15 minutes. Salt and pepper more to taste. Win!

Or Not to Win

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It’s raw.

That is also my Nigerian husband.

The tomatoes are raw. It is not cooked well.

You can imagine that this surprised me because in the South (the Black, US South), we don’t call slow simmers or hour-long fried stews “raw,” so I was insulted.

I listened to him explain that I should have let the tomatoes cook a little longer before I added the other ingredients, and I took my scolding like a grown woman should. After all, “I am the wife,” I thought. “Certainly I can make a tomato stew. It’s a stew.”

So, to Try Again

I didn’t give up. There was no reason to give up since my husband wanted tomato stew and rice every day. This gave me a lot of opportunities to screw up his favorite food.

Sometimes I burnt it… not in the traditional sense of burn, but in the sense that I let the tomatoes fry in the oil just a few minutes too long. Sometimes I added too much fish broth and it came out too thin. Sometimes I cut the spinach too small or too large. Sometimes I needed a second (or a second and a half) Knorr cube.

Sometimes the tomatoes themselves were too bitter. Sometimes the fish I selected was too soft and broke apart (which disappeared in the soup). Sometimes I added too much green pepper. Sometimes I added too much habanero pepper. Sometimes I added a vegetable or two that I shouldn’t have (like broccoli).

A Month Went By…

And I didn’t even notice because I was trying to make the tomato stew my husband remembered from his Nigerian mother’s pot. Our baby was born. All the early sleepless nights passed. I had run out of post-Cesarean painkillers. All along, I was in the kitchen every three days or so… making this stew… and missing the mark three times out of four.

In the End

I just quit. If you were looking for one of those endings where the new wife triumphs and feels the excitement of finally getting it right, you won’t get that here. I mean… other than that one-in-four times I got a complaint-free smile… I pretty much sucked at making this particular food. I can’t say that I’ve necessarily improved either because after more than a month of eating the same dish, I really just wanted to eat something else… which I have been doing for over a year now.

Centuries-Old Magic

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary on Unsplash

I was probably out of line anyway. What made me think that I’d be able to reproduce a man’s mother’s stew having never met her, after a year of videos, and with relatively few days of practice? My great-grandmother’s recipes, which I’ve mastered, were passed down to her by her mother and her mother’s mother, and so on. Our cooking tradition is generational and cultural, particular to the changes of our continent. I started practicing those dishes thirty years ago.

How could I have hoped to reproduce his mother’s centuries-old magic in a pot without some suffering?

Good Thing …

My husband makes his mother’s tomato stew. And yes, he eats it--some variation of it--every day. I don’t. I eat pretty much whatever I want. And we’ve made peace and love about that. 😉