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I have often
wondered why people bother with Nfi, the Nigerian periwinkle; that
insignificant disquietingly green gastropod dressed in black ridged
armor. How can one consider something so easily lost on the palate, or
expend so much energy cleaning or preparing it for an unexceptional
appearance in the meal?

I have on a few
occasions been sent Afang soup or Ekpan ku kwo so disfigured by the
quantity of periwinkles in them that it is like an invasion of the
food; like wading through a swamp full of rocks. And what should be a
texturally soft and comforting meal becomes a challenge, a guilt ridden
meal where one doesn’t want to spend the best part “feeeping” minuscule
periwinkles out of their shells, but doesn’t want to waste the food on
one’s plate either.

On the other hand,
if the periwinkles are removed from their shells and placed in the
soup, they disappear into thin air and add very little personality to
the food. Even when the periwinkles are meticulously cleaned, there
will be at least a few round inedible discs from the periwinkles left
behind in ones teeth that need a whole mile of dental floss to get out.

But I have always
believed that there is a lot about food that is not commonsensical or
comfortable, rather nostalgic, customary, or “I don’t know what but I
like it anyway”.

I once prepared a
meal for a non-Nigerian friend who doesn’t like our country fowl
because according to him, when you break the chicken’s bones, they form
dangerously jagged points that can tear your tongue to shreds.

I don’t know why on
earth a grown man can’t maneuvre his tongue around the bones of a
chicken. Why would anyone despise that delicious meat for such a petty
reason, and choose the tissue paper texture and blandness of Agric
chicken over it? Even if it tore ones tongue to shreds, it is
absolutely worth it. The only possible rationale behind his opinion is
that he has grown up eating his type of chicken and for that reason
prefers it.

I think of soups
made up of Imposing chunks of meat and lethal bones intentionally under
cooked so that the eater must fight with them to eat them. And fighting
is 90% of the enjoyment of the meal: “Swallow” made so resiliently hard
that when you throw it against the wall, it bounces back; soups cooked
with strong smelling condiments like Iru and Ogiri that make the
eater’s mind form all manner of associations that have nothing to do
with food or with anything that one wants to put near ones mouth.

We are not alone in
this predicament. Thai Nam Pla, the condiment commonly known as fish
sauce smells by far worse than Iru. Woe betide you if it pours out in
your car on the way home from the supermarket. Not to talk of Chinese
preserved eggs or even that runny smelly cheese that the French call
Camembert.

In other words,
that wading and bruising of lips is exactly what the seasoned eater of
Nfi wants. Surely, that must be 95% of the experience of eating Nfi! Am
I being too harsh on our beloved Nfi? Aunty Thelma of the famous
Fisherman Stew says that unless a machete is used to scrape the
periwinkle, then it is nowhere near clean especially when one considers
its natural habitat Imagine scraping an Nfi with a machete and at the
end of cooking, all the periwinkle is, is a periwinkle.

I admit to being
the philistine here because I sense that Nfi is also a gastronomic
experience (albeit consisting mostly of sucking). It is the scenic
route; a cultural marker, and even an incidental aphrodisiac. I hear
the sucking sound produced when the Nfi is held to the lips is deeply
suggestive; at least between two people (not five) it is.

Placing the whole
periwinkle in the soup gastronomically works because beads of soup pool
in the small crevices of the periwinkle shell and when that is sucked
out, one gets the essence of the soup plus the flesh of the periwinkle.
But as a reward for such hard work, it is still comparably stingy.

For those
culturally well brought up, there is nothing that animates the appetite
and the enjoyment of one’s meal more than sitting around a table where
the white sound of active Nfi sucking is going on. I have to add that
periwinkles work best for me in soups like Abak (Banga) soup where they
have freedom to move around, and they are not crowding out the soup or
competing with the greens.

Is eating the
periwinkle more a force of habit than quelling hunger or eating
protein, or tasting anything at all? Is the sucking more important for
cultural glue and communal thanksgiving than getting meat out of its
shell?

I suspect the
answer is that I have overanalysed the periwinkle and that for those
who have eaten it all their lives, they know what the periwinkle tastes
like, and will say it tastes like fish or snails or has some unique
taste that can’t really be described.

For their sakes, I stand waiting to be corrected.