Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
2.8 The Sudanese Kitchen(s) with Omer Eltigani
70 Plays3 years ago
Camel milk, mushrooms, ta’miyah, agashe, aseeda, tarkeen, these are just some of the foods and dishes that make up Sudan’s intricate network of cuisines. We spoke with Omer Eltigani, cook, archivist and founder of ‘The Sudanese Kitchen’ to talk more about the country’s vast foods, their historical influences and how he is trying to bring these recipes to the younger generation.
This episode also features comments on gender and food from Jennifer Shutek, PhD candidate and instructor, as well as a discussion on food and identity with filmmaker Hajooj Kuka.
Follow Jennifer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/quixoticavocado
Watch Hajooj's documentary 'Beats of Antonov': https://vimeo.com/ondemand/59409?autoplay=1
Visit Omer's website 'The Sudanese Kitchen': https://www.sudanesekitchen.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Sudanese Identity: Middle Eastern vs African Influences
00:00:00
Speaker
We're more critical now. We're thinking more critically about our identities and our backgrounds and our history and our culture. And I think Sudan and Sudanese individuals should look at their own identity and start embracing the reality that we are obviously this fusion of Middle Eastern Arabs and Africans. And I think the food also is a good example of that. So it shows you that it's this complex mixture.
00:00:26
Speaker
I just think it's time to really question how Middle Eastern we are. Just because we speak Arabic and we make some foods, I don't think that's enough.
Founding of Sudanese Kitchen by Amal Tejani
00:00:50
Speaker
This is Instant Coffee, where we explore everything related to food in the Middle East. We're Ribal and Nadine, and on this episode we spoke to Amal Tejani, co-founder of the Sudanese Kitchen. Like many of us living away from home, it was only after Amal left the university that he started appreciating and missing his mum's cooking, and tried to recreate this comfort for himself and for others.
00:01:12
Speaker
The Sudanese Kitchen is a celebration of Sudanese food and the country's cultures, identities and complex history. Amr is also working on publishing his first cookbook and organises supper clubs for those curious about Sudanese food. Taking on a project like this requires a lot of time and dedication.
Culinary Inspirations from Family
00:01:28
Speaker
We wanted to know if Amr had any inspirations, people that encouraged him to start the Sudanese Kitchen and help them keep going.
00:01:35
Speaker
I definitely feel like I've been quite fortunate in kind of my upbringing and what kind of access I've had to certain Sudanese foods in different environments and people have been very generous to me in many ways. A lot of them are my family members of course.
00:01:48
Speaker
And for example, grandparents specifically, I just feel like they're the ones that inspired me. And they always did so much to just make us as happy and as comfortable as possible. And this is, I guess, my way of kind of showing up that appreciation, really. I know you describe yourself as an archivist. Where do you go to get your
00:02:08
Speaker
to get your recipes, to get your information about Sudan and Sudanese cuisine? I guess it starts very close to home. So it's like family, parents, aunts, people who I trust who have made good food and have eaten it or a very specific thing. Specifically with Sudanese food, there's certain aunts or ladies that are known to make a particular thing, whether it's a stew or a salad or dessert. And I tend to sort of look for these individuals that are known for making
00:02:35
Speaker
good types of food. And then yeah, travel, I guess, traveling around in Sudan. I've only been a few times on the road traveling around, but that's a really good source of information, getting really rare recipes. How do people react to you coming in from the outside and asking them this kind of question?
Cultural Concerns and Culinary Sharing
00:02:55
Speaker
Do you get any kind of
00:02:57
Speaker
negative response from people there. So many people are really nice and welcoming for the most part. That's just how they are. But every now and again, you sometimes feel like people are a bit protective of certain things, maybe a recipe or something like this, or even to some degree, like their culture generally. And they see me not necessarily as an outsider because I'm speaking to them in Arabic.
00:03:18
Speaker
and they know that I'm certainly based overseas. But I feel some resistance sometimes. I think they have this fear, and it's only happened a couple of times, that people fear people coming in and scooping up all this information and then leaving and then profiting from it financially, specifically financially. They think that I'm going to go away and make a lot of money from this information, which if you understand books, it's not really a thing.
00:03:46
Speaker
What have you found in your travels around Sudan? Have there been any recipes that have stood out for you? Things with camel milk and things with mushrooms, which I didn't know existed in some parts of Sudan. Goats, stews, which I also haven't had much access to in Sudan. So yeah, very surprising things. All the time, I think the more I dig, the more I get surprised.
Adapting Sudanese Cuisine for Global Audiences
00:04:08
Speaker
Ahmad is writing his cookbook to preserve recipes for the next Sudanese generation. He also wants people interested in food from anywhere and of any age to be able to pick up the book and start making something Sudanese. His audience is mainly based in big cities like London and New York. It's sometimes difficult to find certain ingredients outside of Sudan, so he has adapted his recipes accordingly.
00:04:32
Speaker
There are ingredients that are harder to find. You will eventually find them and there might be one place in London that has it, but it's obviously here. And if you live in like a more remote place, you probably shouldn't make that recipe.
00:04:46
Speaker
But even if you live in a remote place, 80% of the book, you should be able to access it from your local kind of supermarket or whatever. It's just kind of common things. Maybe 20%, you might have to go into an urban center, London, New York, Toronto, whatever, and find these rarer ingredients, which might be like ground okra or ritla, per se. Like the other day, I went to Peckham and I was looking for fish powder.
00:05:12
Speaker
And that comes everywhere, but I couldn't find anywhere else in London. And on your website you say that you're providing accurate information about Sudanese
Accuracy in Documenting Sudanese Recipes
00:05:21
Speaker
cuisine. What do you mean by this and how much writing about Sudanese food is actually out there at the moment? What I meant by accurate in that particular sense is that there is some information about Sudanese food, not a lot, but there is some online.
00:05:36
Speaker
and often it's somewhat inaccurate so like either it's missing an ingredient or it doesn't contain the amounts it just says the name of the ingredient and doesn't tell you how much of it to use this is because you know people have just written it in like a quick way or something and like oh you need these items and then you do this to it and i feel like
00:05:56
Speaker
Even the technique is a bit too oversimplified. And what I tried to do is accurately state the ingredients that you need, all of them, and their amounts, which is quite difficult to get. And then an accurate technique that's going to work every time. So I just meant kind of accuracy throughout because there is limited information on Sudanese food and it's not necessarily presented in the best way. For my conversations with Amal,
00:06:23
Speaker
It was clear to us that the women in his life, like his mother, his grandmother and his aunts, played a major role in his journey with food.
Power Dynamics in Culinary Knowledge
00:06:31
Speaker
But he also spoke about cooking as a man in society, where the mothers and matriarchs are in charge of food. We wanted to explore this relationship between gender and food a bit more, so we spoke to PhD candidate Jennifer Shutek.
00:06:43
Speaker
I'm particularly interested in the ways in which foodways and culinary landscapes are tied to identity, migration, and also to larger systems and structures of power and inequality.
00:06:54
Speaker
Jennifer researches and teaches the intersections between built environments, foodways and power structures with a focus on Palestine and Israel. So one of the fieldwork trips that I took to Palestine, I was based in Bethlehem for a month about and was living with a Palestinian family there and so I spent
00:07:15
Speaker
between five and eight hours a day, almost every day of the week, with the sort of matriarch of the family. And it was really interesting. She was in her 60s. And so I spent time with her and through her a number of her friends, her sort of very dense social network. There's something I think very interesting happening with these women who, you know, in a sort of classical formulation have less power because of their gender. But in fact, through their culinary knowledge, through their embodied knowledge of how to
00:07:44
Speaker
cook and how to provide for their extended families. They maintain actually a sort of exceptional place of power in the family because everybody relies on them, right? They are still cooking for their adult sons who are married and have children. And they sort of guard their recipes and their culinary knowledge in a way because it is, I think, a method of power. It's also a way of kind of maintaining your social networks with your family, right? You build in
00:08:11
Speaker
through a sort of proprietary embodied culinary knowledge, a sense of really deep importance. And you are a knowledge keeper in the community. And I think we think of knowledge keepers maybe in a lot of ways that aren't necessarily food related. But I think especially in these kitchens, you can see the way in which older generation women are very important nodes of culinary knowledge. And as a result, they are sort of from a physical, biological, caloric, nutritional perspective, essential
00:08:39
Speaker
being a man, being interested in food, they were very puzzled by the whole situation and they were questioning it a lot, like why do you want to know, why are you interested? And in some senses they were like, no, this is not for you, this is not information that you should be having, so gatekeeping in many ways. And then as I told them that I'm working on this book project and I'd like people to have access to it, they wanted the idea and
00:09:04
Speaker
And I think it's this kind of dismantling of kind of gendered norms in Sudan and in the region really. So cooking or food related topics are seen as kind of a women's domain. And so there's an aspect of sort of almost sociable grumbling that happens that we're doing so much work. And I've asked, you know, why don't you teach your, especially your sons, how to cook?
00:09:31
Speaker
or how to clean in the way that you want. And they sort of say, oh, it's too much work for that. But I do believe that there is a subtext under that, that of course they could teach their children and they could teach their sons or their daughters exactly how to reproduce these recipes. But I actually do believe that there is a very conscious way in which sort of matriarchal power is held through keeping these recipes and through choosing who gets to receive them.
00:09:59
Speaker
I think it's this idea of domestic cooking that's seen as as a woman's role and this idea of like showcasing a cuisine and kind of working in restaurants and having this kind of gourmet style or whatever that that's seen as something that a man would do and it'd be it'd be quite funny actually because
00:10:16
Speaker
Some founding members, when I told them I'm writing a book about food, they're very much supportive of the writing aspect because they think that writing is a man's profession. But they're not interested in the cooking part, so they get a bit confused. And I think we should challenge both, obviously.
Sudan's Blended Identity Through Cuisine
00:10:34
Speaker
Being brought up in Lebanon myself, my geography teacher made sure that we memorized the list of all 22 Arab states. So to me, naively, Sudan was very much part of the Arab world. We always questioned our Arabness or our identity as Lebanese, some even claiming to be Phoenician. But the discussion about identity in Sudan as a country never really reached us. Looking through the lens of food, we asked our Marafeeses any continuity between Sudanese food and cuisines from the Arab world and the Middle East.
00:11:03
Speaker
So there absolutely is that continuity between Middle Eastern food, generally, and Sudanese food. There's a lot of overlap, I should say. So there's no typical kind of Middle Eastern things. Tamiya, different types of salads and things like this. Many different ways of making, I don't know, rice dishes or anything like this. And using spices. So definitely the use of spices, this type of
00:11:27
Speaker
very Arab, Middle Eastern style food that also has roots in kind of Turkish food as well because Sudan was a couple hundred years ago as a Turkish colony so a lot of Turkish influence was put into Sudan there so there's a lot of Turkish influence and Middle Eastern generally but the food also represents a lot of West African traits some things that like that was brought over into Sudan as West African migrants were moving through Sudan to get to Mecca
00:11:55
Speaker
and then end up staying in Sudan and making their food there. Things like Agache or Aasida and things like this. Very kind of West African foods that are now Sudanese foods. So Sudan really has this really interesting kind of fusion of cuisines. So I just think that when it comes to our identity, it's just something that's very complicated and complex and always has been. I think historically Sudan's always aligned itself
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, politically, I'd say even culturally, more with the Middle East than it has with neighboring countries in East Africa.
00:12:58
Speaker
In a previous episode with Omnia Shaukat, we spoke about the country's unique position between Africa and the Arab world. And we wanted to dig deeper into Amr's statement, so we spoke with Hajuj Kuka.
Personal and National Identity Post-Separation
00:13:09
Speaker
Hajuj is a Sudanese filmmaker and activist. He directed the film Beets of Antonov, a documentary film released in 2014. It follows the conflict between government forces and the Sudan Revolutionary Front in the Blue Nile and the Nuba Mountains.
00:13:22
Speaker
looking at how music helped communities throughout. The music you hear on this episode is taken from the film. And if you haven't done so already, I asked you to please get yourself on Vimeo and watch the film ASAP. Well, after you finish listening to this episode, of course. The thing about Sudanese identity and the thing that got me thinking a lot about it is when we had a separation and we became two countries. And if you have an identity of Sudanese and then suddenly you're halved or third is gone, becomes different.
00:13:52
Speaker
you start questioning yourself like what is my identity then what is what is this country identity that I belong to part of it starts like trying to find out what is it what does it mean to be Sudanese what is it Sudanese and at the time we had a military dictatorship it was a military Islamic dictatorship that
00:14:09
Speaker
enforced everybody to be one thing, which wasn't true to us. So where I am from, I didn't adhere to that identity. So growing up, I always, we always in the house will say this, those Sudanese, the Sudanese, no, no, no. So we didn't ourselves think about it because my grandmother didn't speak Arabic. So grew up with not knowing where, where, how I belong to this country.
00:14:33
Speaker
and thinking that that's them, the center, that's the Sudanese. And that reflects in everything. It reflects on your music, it reflects on how you dress, how you view yourself, how you view others, who you're supposed to belong to, but you see yourself, you don't. I always had that identity thing, but to me it was very rooted. I was like, ah, I'm always, I'm Nubian. So I always went back to that root, which a lot of Sudanese people do. You go back to a different root, that's not Sudanese.
00:15:01
Speaker
We're more critical now. We're thinking more critically about our identities and our backgrounds and our history and our culture.
00:15:09
Speaker
And I think Sudan and Sudanese individuals should look at their own identity and start kind of embracing the reality that we are obviously this fusion of Middle Eastern Arabs and Africans. And I think the food also is a good example of that. So it shows you that it's this complex mixture. I just think it's time to really question how Middle Eastern we are. Just because we speak Arabic and we make some foods,
00:15:38
Speaker
I don't think that's enough. And something I notice a lot about our food is when we have people coming to us, these people tend to hide our food. The dishes change, like we had the terkeen. So the terkeen is this fermented fish. So normally in my house, we used to do it every Friday. There's more than one way to prepare it. And the original way, it's actually eaten just raw. And something that I discovered later, we normally don't put tomatoes in it or anything.
00:16:07
Speaker
because tomato came from the new world. It came from Mexico, so traditionally it's not there. But when we have guests, suddenly it's cooked, and you add tomato, and it becomes this other dish that I don't like as much. This is like if a surinise comes in. If a non-surinise comes in, turkey needs to be nowhere seen, because it smells really strong, and the dishes suddenly change, and suddenly you have bread and rice, and the dishes don't look like us, and we'll have food and tamir. Suddenly our food will completely change,
00:16:37
Speaker
We're trying to be a good host, but we expect the other not to like our food. Even when I went to other countries and I saw Sudanese restaurants, and they don't serve Sudanese food. They would serve Middle Eastern. They'll just add a Sudanese touch of peanut butter. We like peanut butter. Although peanut butter also came not from us. It came from the new world. But actually, when I started discovering that all these foods didn't originate from us, and I started trying to figure out
00:17:04
Speaker
So if I take tomatoes out, and if I take the peanut butter out, what is our food?
Cultural Rediscovery Post-2018 Revolution
00:17:10
Speaker
The Sudanese revolution that started in December 2018 united its people in demand of economic and political reform and freedom. It was a major turning point for the country and its people. When that started, there was a big sit-in that happened that later on was dismantled by Jin Jui, the rabbit response force, and a lot of people killed. But during that sit-in, it was the first time a lot of people came together.
00:17:34
Speaker
from different backgrounds, from different way of thinking, from different cultures. So they all got together in the sit-in, and they started discovering each other. They started discovering food that was being celebrated. They were discovering music. They were discovering dance. They were discovering languages. People started discovering each other. And by that, they started to discover their identity or not. Sadly, the sit-in was destroyed. And after the sit-in,
00:18:05
Speaker
everybody just went where they came from. So there wasn't again that let's get together and let's celebrate our diversity. People are kind of in a more enlightened place, in a more critical place, in a more rebellious space, rebelling against the kind of norms that we had been kind of conditioned by kind of media and the government for so long. Even other things about like
00:18:31
Speaker
saying that South Sudanese people aren't our people, aren't Sudanese people. And that we should, you know, we should, this is the government of Amara Bishir, obviously. So we need to reevaluate that in some ways. So I think a lot of Sudanese young people, older people, I think for quite a few decades, actually, have gone under quite a lot of brainwashing. So I think now it's time to think critically, look around us and questioning these norms.
00:19:04
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Instant Coffee, a podcast brought to you by the Alice in the Lease Center. Join us every other Tuesday for a new episode. To learn more about Jennifer, Hajuj, and of course, Alma, follow the links in the podcast description. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our channel.