The Eating Habits of Househelps
Words by Ireti Oluwagbemi
Photography by Light Oriye
There are three rungs of privilege: there are those who don’t cook; those who perform some cooking; and finally those who cook because the first two rungs aren’t really cooking.
For professional, middle-class women like my mother, the buying and preparation of ingredients could be outsourced to the domestic help or children, but the final step, frying, boiling or mashing, was reserved for her, the ‘mummy’ of the house. This is the privilege of not fully cooking. If you are wealthy enough to afford a cook, in addition to domestic help, then your primary job is drafting a weekly timetable of meals, and project managing the pace at which meat disappears from a fresh pot of soup. This is the privilege of not cooking at all.
Last year I outsourced the buying and preparation of food in my home to Bola Gbadebo, who everyone calls Mummy Michael; named after her first child, as is customary. I address her with the pronoun for an elder when speaking Yoruba, and cringe when she insists on using the same formal pronoun for me.
Mummy Michael is a kind, softly spoken woman with strong and occasionally contradictory opinions. On the days she works at my house, I often offer her some of my own food. She is always appreciative of this gesture, but will refuse if it’s a meal she considers strange, politely declining with the ultimate Nigerian refusal: ‘I don’t know how to eat it’. It’s uncivil to probe when someone says that, but I probe anyway. She admits she’s a firm believer in the common illusion that eating strange foods will cause diarrhea.
“It is cowardness,” is the interjection of Evans Ugwuokwe, that comes when I repeat Mummy Michael's favorite refusal. Evans is a middle-aged Ghanaian man, who has worked almost three decades as a cook in Nigeria. He is the head chef for the official residence of an EU ambassador where he’s worked for the last 24 years. I am speaking to him along with his friend and sous chef Boniface. Evans’ first job in Nigeria was earned through guts and a dash of luck. With no knowledge of a vacancy, he followed a gardener friend to work and then offered his unsolicited services as a cook. He was tasked with making breakfast on the spot. “I grilled him one funny bacon,” Evans chuckles. “I was so tiny then.”
“Meat is meat and fish is fish, but you eat too many things that are neither.”
I tell Evans and Boniface that Mummy Michael thinks okra, pureed and steamed, is capable of undoing any spiritual achievement procured through prayer and fasting in any religion. Neither man accepts any non-medical reason for not trying a food, especially superstition. “Everything is worth trying even once,” Evans says, his exception to that rule being frogs. He saw them grilled on a cooking show once and never forgot his revulsion. “Flying chicken,” Boniface calls it. “I won’t eat that. Or snake.” Mummy Michael’s list of prohibited foods extends beyond okra. She tells me she’ll absolutely never try any of the strange things I eat, such as Thai green curry with rice. “Meat is meat and fish is fish, but you eat too many things that are neither.” Her best food? Pounded yam with Egusi soup and bushmeat. And okra soup. I don’t point out the irony of her love for okra because I don’t think she cares.
Her favorite memory of food is when she travelled to Ondo state for a party. She ate a dish of yam and egg with ‘strange’ elements but it was all very tasty. Everyone else at their table steered clear of it because the driver, who was also at the party, kept threatening not to offer a relief stop for anyone suffering diarrhea. I asked if she had been afraid of that fate, to which she answered, “It would have been worth it.” She’s as pleased at her adventurousness as she is determined not to repeat it. At home, she cooks food she grew up eating in Ilorin. Nothing else makes the cut, not even the traditional meals from her husband’s hometown, which he makes for himself.
Evans and Boniface’s favorite food memories were made at work. Evans tells me about a perfectly grilled and presented filet of grouper he once made for a pescatarian boss. Boni has a similar story from 1998, when he worked for a foreign diplomat. His employer was hosting the Western doctors who had just concluded an autopsy on MKO Abiola, Nigeria’s beloved president-elect who died under mysterious circumstances before he was sworn into office. He settled on a three-course meal that included a butter chicken recipe he’d seen Madhur Jaffrey cook on BBC Food. After dinner, one of the doctors slipped him a ten pound note as thanks; the cook’s first gift. Boniface beams as he recalls it.
I ask Boniface and Evans to name the biggest difference between cooking at home and work. At work there are various dietary preferences to consider, and meals require rigorous discipline and attention, but at home, “they eat whatever you throw in the pot”. “You also need to be more economical with ingredients at home,” Boniface adds. And no one compliments the food at home both men say.
As I am about to leave, Evans tells me I haven’t asked for their worst food memory. He was making lunch for a meeting when the oven unexpectedly went out and he lost an hour of slow-cooking time. His manager threatened to sack him if guests had to wait. The next day, none of his colleagues in the kitchen spoke to him, certain he was out. Recalling his trauma, he hangs his head and lowers his voice: “But it wasn’t my fault.” Boni’s mistake was not tasting a bitter watermelon before adding it to a fruit salad.
My worst food memory was on a Sunday in August of 2011. My dad had just finished one of his fits of rage and was making himself a plate of jollof rice by the kitchen counter, while I wilted into a door nearby, afraid to leave til he’d returned to his room. He finished and was pouring some Coke into a glass when his face started contorting into an expression I didn’t understand. He never recovered from the stroke. If she isn’t cleaning, Mummy Michael would like to cook for people full time, but the profession she’s always loved is childcare. In her twenties she worked at a daycare facility in a hospital; the longest employment she’s had. She left not long after losing her friend and colleague, Jibike. She hopes to have a daycare centre of her own some day.
As I prepare to leave, in earnest this time, I ask the men if they think everything will return to normal after the pandemic. “Anything is possible,” Evans says—in a world where people are filleting toads.
