The word Akara is
so soft yet so seductively broken on the back of that letter ‘k’ that
as it is spoken, you can visualise and hear the squish and subtle chew;
the compression of air through the pores of warm, crisp, freshly fried
bean fritters.
I have been
fascinated with Akara ever since I was told that infamous, cruel,
outrageous “Ajapa” story about Akara and honey as a child. The story is
in fact so disgusting that I cannot repeat the details in a food
column. Suffice it to say that Ajapa, the wily tortoise understood
keenly that any artillery of wickedness and deception is not complete
without knowing how to cook at least one dish to evil distraction.
His forte, Akara and honey, the very idea of it, has made my mouth water like mad for close to forty years.
With it he
conquered two adversaries; a vain swaggering elephant, and an inflated
ambitious chimpanzee. In reality, there is nothing like Akara and
honey, nothing like Akara which behaves in the way that a jam doughnut
does; a fried ball of dough that oozes some sweet suspension hidden
inside.
Honeyed Akara is a
magical ideal, not only one that appeals to children in the way that
sweet things in children’s books or stories uncompromisingly do; like
that swelling bonbon in Enid Blyton’s land on the faraway tree that
eventually explodes in the mouth releasing an elixir sweet and warm.
Akara and honey is our cultural pregnant bonbon because there is no
Nigerian child that cannot relate to fried Akara and honey. It is a
challenge that well made Akara should be as sweet as honey. Not
literally, but the type of sweetness that the Yoruba for example use to
define/symbolise everything from existence to painful childbirth.
Anyone in my
generation can recall the suspense in the words “Tortoise went home to
prepare some akara into which he added some fresh honey…he placed it
just outside [the lion’s] door and left to hide behind a tree. The
Akara was warm and its aroma hung in the air …[lion] picked one ball
of Akara and ate it and this Akara was sweeter than any Akara he had
ever eaten before. He ate another one, and then another one until all
the Akara was gone.” Back to reality where Saturday morning Akara
always falls short because it is too predictable, because it is
relegated to being simply accompaniment to something, to ogi or Quaker
oats, or moin moin, because there is no flamboyant engineering of
Umami, no twist, no possibility of a daring collision of savoury and
opinionated sweetness, …like Mama Rose’s sweet puff puffs defiantly
eaten with stewed red kidney beans… When I think of tortoise’s
Akara’s, I think, well why not?
Why must it always be the same peeled beans blended with water, same chopped onions, salt, pepper; basic, savoury, flat?
So, last Saturday morning, I put my peeled beans in a blender,
along with two
small leeks, because the smell of leeks always remind me of cooking
beans, and because leeks are my favourite vegetables for adding full
rounded flavours to food. I added some garlic and ginger and sea salt,
hot chillies and some coconut cream. In the past, I had successfully
added a large tablespoon of Tahini, sesame seed paste to my blended
beans. But last Saturday, all I had was some almond butter, so a
tablespoon of that went in instead. Then two egg yolks and some dried
Cameroonian pepper. Everything was blended with water until I had a
thick pouring consistency that coated my spoon. If I had had some
coconut oil, it would have been fried in that, but all I had was some
dull vegetable oil. And so, the shallow frying began; the therapeutic
ladling of imperfect circles into hot oil. The Akara is a strange
creature, and I hope someday someone with a scientific mind will
explain why it guzzles so much oil, and then does something to the oil
left in the pan that makes it lazy. After the first two to three sets
of Akara, my oil lost its elasticity, and the Akara spread sideways
into pancakes instead of rising into plump bellies. I was compelled to
add more and more fresh oil, all the time dreading where it would all
go, congealing and layering in the human anatomy.
As my frying, progressed, I began to wish I had some shrimp to attempt a tempura with my blended beans.
What would an Akara concealing a whole shrimp taste like? Would it work?
Is the mixture too laid-back to work?
I altered the
batches, because my palate always becomes bored after eating a few
Akara that taste the same, better if some of them blow your head off,
and some are gentle, and some are slightly more garlicky, and some have
hidden green peppers, and some are fried in palm oil and some in plain, and some eaten dipped in mayonnaise and some in pure unadulterated, tested with fire honey.
