Ugandan starches

I couldn’t honestly say that Uganda offers the first-time visitor a dazzling array of culinary pleasures. It does, however, offer a stomach settling variety of starches to accompany main meals. Indeed, the starches – for to talk of carbs would be misleading – the starches can swamp the main meals, as this bean curry + accompaniments illustrates.In Masindi, on the way back from Murchison Falls National Park, I had lunch with, inter alia, a Swedish woman and her Tanzanian husband who had been living in Uganda for the last few months. I let them guide me through my two dollar lunch (passion-juice not pictured). To be honest, I had expected less of the bean curry in terms of taste and more in terms of volume. As it happened, the bean curry was the best part of the meal, a faaaabulous success: fresh beans cooked up in the same spicy tomato sauce as the goat curry, the fish curry and the beef curry. It looks like bad baked beans, one of the few things I won’t eat, and tastes, happily, much better. The orangey red stuff is chilli sauce, a lifesaver.
The starches, however, are the object of interest here. Obviously it’s rice sitting in the centre so I’ll start my identification with the gritty greens in the right-hand corner. My local contacts weren’t able to identify the greens, instead choosing to place them as a distant relative of the silverbeet. Distant, yes, but a green vegetable nonetheless and therefore good.

Moving clockwise from the greens we hit the posho first. Posho is stiff porridge-y kinda substance made from ground maize. In Tanzania and Kenya it’s called ugali and in all three countries, it’s a dietary staple. At best, it’s heavy and bland. At worst, it’s the stodge at the centre of every single meal. Posho isn’t offensive to the tastebuds, I suppose, but it’s not a dish for which I’m clamouring to find the recipe.

From posho to the yellow stuff in the corner, matoke, another staple that isn’t exactly inedible, but that you probably wouldn’t eat unless you really had to. Matoke is made from cooked, mashed plantains and is vastly improved by salt and chilli sauce. Lots and lots of beer helps too, I guess.

Jump over the rice and you hit grilled, boiled sweet potato, crumbling all over the plate. Not awful, but avoidable in an ideal world. Boiled cassava, on the other hand, is something that I find pretty awful. Anyone remember Perkin’s Paste? If Perkin’s Paste was a vegetable dish, that dish would be boiled cassava. Better to boil the cassava to buggery and make tapioca from the starch, I say.

It makes me feel like a timid mazungu, but of all the starches gathered hereabove, the most familiar wins the prize.
Rice?
Rice Really is Quite Nice!
Twice?
Rice is Very Very Nice!