Home » Burkina Faso » Let's Eat

There are a great variety of delicious local dishes to be tried in Ivory Coast, although it can be a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. We found that in general, hotel restaurants are over-priced and the food is not that great, especially if they try to cook French dishes.

Let's Eat

Ajcairns
2005-11-04 20:48:05

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they split them open with the machete and cut a bit of the husk which you can use to scrape out the pulp inside. You can also get the hardened coconuts which are available in Europe, but these are not nearly as nice as the fresh, mushy, pulp scooped out from a coconut straight off the tree.

A lot of the stereotypes about Africans eating snakes, lizards, insects, etc were not lived up to. Although going out into the villages in the brousse we did eat some more 'exotic' things like snails (huge ones which had 10 cm diameter shells), frogs (the whole thing, not just the legs), and viande de brousse (meat from the forest) - things like squirrels and large rats.

It was a bit of an eye-opener to see teenagers running after a rat that they spotted in the village one night, beating it to death with bamboo sticks and then going off to eat it; or to see a cousin of Rocheline's coming back from his traps in the forest with a dead squirrel strapped to the back of his bike. Supposedly they eat monkeys whenever they can find one, but they are becoming rarer and rarer, since they are over hunted.

Mostly though in the village, we ate chicken in a spicy sauce with rice or aloko. Chicken was their main source of meat, and as a sign of respect people would come and offer me one or two live chickens, which I accepted, taking the chicken by their scaly feet (as was the customary way of saying thanks). Then I handed them over to Rocheline's mother or one of her aunts who would go off and kill them, pluck them, and cook them.

Meat is a scarcity, and more or less every last bit of the chicken (apart from the beak, eyes and crown) is eaten. The intestines are cleaned, fried and then given to the children to eat; the claws and neck are added to the sauce along with the rest; the bones are crunched on and the marrow and juice sucked out of them; gristle and fat are gladly devoured. In fact, I did feel a bit guilty ...