offal

A friend recently passed around one of those long 'getting to know you' questionnaires that one fills in and then sends around. A friend to whom I sent the questionnaire remarked in her answers to a comment I had made:

7. What is your favourite cuisine?
probably french or italian, though i like almost anything (though now that you've brought up offal, i'm not so sure that i want to eat in botswana)

This deserves some explanation.

Many a time since coming to Botswana I have eaten seswaa, a dish wherein meat is cooked and then pounded until it's shredded. The consistency is about that of pulled pork, and I think it's right tasty.

There's another dish, though, called serobe, which is described on one website as, "Thoroughly washed, then boiled mixture of tripe, intestines and lungs. They are cut into small pieces with a pair of scissors before being spiced to add taste."

Well, anyway, as you might remember, I was at the Third Annual 'Son of the Soil' party last month (sort of a reclamation of Tswana tradition). I had not at this point managed to bring myself to try serobe, despite my love of seswaa. The cooked food was arranged in sort of a buffet line, with each cook serving what he or she had prepared. I went through the line, collecting beans and corn and cooked vegetables, all the while scolding myself that I ought to be a good anthropologist and eat the serobe already.

The meat pots were at the very end of the line. I told the man who was serving seswaa that I liked it, and he gave me a nice, big scoop from his pot.

The man serving serobe gave me a huge smile and said, "This is just like seswaa --- with offal!"



I didn't touch it. The homonynic relationship between 'offal' and 'awful' didn't help the matter. My housemate, who has been coming to Bots on and off for years, told me it tastes like dirt and I wasn't missing much anyway, so while I feel kinda wimpy, I can't flog myself that badly.