Voila, Peanut Butter

Written September 23rd, 2010

Peanut Butter has been difficult to find in my village. It is particularly frustrating because it was been easy to find everywhere else. It scared the small village I will call home for two years lacks one of my favorite foods. As kuyper would say in a nasally voice, unlucky. After passively keeping a look-out for peanut butter since my arrival, I intensified my efforts four days ago.

Before I go into my quest for peanut butter, I should first describe the markets en brousse. Each village is not big enough to sustain a daily market. Having a full daily market in my tiny village would be like trying to sustain a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Saratoga, Wyoming. For those who are unfamiliar with Saratoga, it is a small town, of which my uncle is superintendent of schools, and in which, I promise, will never be a Starbucks, let alone a Wal-Mart.

The villages here en brousse are so small and the people so minimalistic that there wouldn’t by enough sales to keep a daily market afloat. Yet, just like everywhere else in the world, people need groceries. The villages found a clever solution to this problem. Six villages in my region, for who knows for how many centuries, rotate hosting the market. The vendors become nomadic salesman. For example, my neighbors make soap and piment to sell at the markets. Each morning, they fill sacks full of prodect, strap it to a moto, and the sons take it and sell it at whichever village is hosting the market that day. I would guess that a village’s population, at least downtown traffic, more than doubles on market days, and the economy has to increase by even more than two-fold.

Here is a list of produce and products on can find at such rotary markets.

5-6 Small Tomatoes 50 CFA 10¢

3-4 Onions 40 CFA 40¢

3-4 Cucumbers 100 CFA 20¢

8-10 Small Potatoes 100 CFA 20¢

Baggie of sugar 300 CFA 60¢

*Loaf of village bread 50 CFA 10¢

5-6 Plantains 50 CFA 10c

100 Limes (Not a typo) 100 CFA 20¢

*To picture a loaf of village bread, think of a subway white foot-long, subtract 4 inches, cut the diameter in half and decrease the freshness perhaps significantly depending on the day.

This is the context in which I had been unsuccessfully searching for peanut butter. There does not exist a peanut butter vendor that solicits the heavenly product at the Loumana market. There is une vielle (old women with implied female gender) who occasionally makes and sells peanut butter at her house. However, the asking price seemed to be quite outrageous. Keeping in the prices above, she was asking 1500 CFA (3 dollars!) to fill an empty peanut butter jar left over from a care package my mom sent me – thanks mom! I couldn’t get myself to pay that much money. After going days without peanut butter and craving it, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I was going to make peanut butter myself. How hard could it be?

I asked Adama what was the first step to make peanut butter. I should have predicted his response.

“You must buy peanuts.”

“How many?”

“Many.”

That is what I did. I went to the market, as Loumana’s turn in the 6 day rotation, to buy many peanuts. I brought a sack full of peanuts and we started peeling raw peanuts. That in itself was a new experience. After two hours of peeling, with the help of Adama and his younger brother, Imbrahim, my thumbs were raw but the sack was almost gone. I asked Adama what we must do after the peanuts are peeled.

We said the peanuts I bought would not make much peanut butter. He said I would have to go buy more peanuts.

“How much more?”

“Many”

I went back to the market and bought again many peanuts. After another two hours of peeling and really raw thumbs, the second sack was almost empty. I repeated my question inquiring the next step in the process. He said I must let the peanuts dry.

Let them dry I did. A full day my 2X many raw peanuts sat evenly spread drying in the African sun. Dried peanuts are depressingly smaller than raw soft peanuts. The water simply evaporates. My raw peanuts filled to pots while my dried peanuts only filled one.

“Adama,” I asked. “The peanuts are dry. Now what must I do?”

“Build a fire,” he said with a knowing grin.

Build a fire I did. The fire was built in a metal cylinder not unlike the ones found in campgrounds in the states. Once the fire was going, Adama, with a limp from elephantiasis, dragged from a shed a metal cylindrical peanut roaster. The waster was 12 inches in diameter and 2 feet long. It was speared with a metal rod allowing one to rotate the roaster while it sat over the fire.

Rotate we did. For over an hour, Adama and I protected out eyes from smoke, fought to keep the fire hot and rotated my peanuts until they were golden brown. Several times we removed the contraption from the fire and several times I was to hear him say they were not yet ready. Finally, after I was beginning to question the wisdom in the decision to make peanut butter, he said they were ready.

After letting the peanuts cool, Adama said we have to remove the skins from each of the thousands of peanuts. I was getting tired.

Fortunately, we used a board to crush the peanuts against the cement floor to separate the skins from the nut. Tossing this mixture of peanuts and peanut skins repeatedly into the air with a plate allowed the skins to be caught by the breeze leaving only the nuts to fall back to the plate. With this completed, I was ready to go the mill.

At the mill, there were four different presses: one for corn, a second for millet, a third for random things, and a fourth for peanuts. I gave the teenager my pot of roasted peanuts, and free of charge, he ran my peanuts through the press completing the transformation from raw peanuts into delicious, natural, absolutely 100% nothing but peanuts peanut butter. I had exactly enough peanut butter to fill the jar that would have cost me 1500 CFA. Depending on how you look at it, I saved 750 CFA, 750 lemons or a buck fifty by making peanut butter myself. Even thought it was a good experience, the next time my peanut butter jar is empty, I will happily pay the difference.