Tanzanian Meat Stew

More about Tanzanian Meat Stew in the Rare Recipes pages:

• Rosanne Guggisberg

Richard Francis Burton

Onions are expensive in the interior

Between 1856 and 1859 Richard Francis Burton traveled from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika and back, and then wrote The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860; reprinted by Dover Publications, and by Scholarly Press). In Burton's time, onions were rare in some parts of Africa, though they were known in ancient times in Egypt, the Middle East and Asia where they originated.

They [the Arabs of Unyanyembe, near present-day Tabora, Tanzania] declare to having derived great benefit from the introduction of onions--an antifebral, which flourishes better in Central than in Maritime Africa. The onion, so thriving in South Africa, rapidly degenerates upon the island of Zanzibar into a kind of house-leek. In Unyamwezi it is of tolerable size and flavor. It enters into a variety of dishes, the most nauseous being probably the sugared onion-omelet. In consequence of general demand, onions are expensive in the interior; an indigo-dyed shukkah [a piece of cloth six feet in length] will purchase a little more than a pound. When the bulbs fail, the leaves, chopped into thin circles and fried in clarified butter with salt, are eaten as a relish with meat. They are also inserted into marak, or soups, to disguise the bitter and rancid taste of stale ghee.
[Chapter X - We Enter Unyamwezi, the Far-Famed Land of the Moon]

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