June 4th: First taste of Malagasy Cuisine!

Friday, June 4th we woke up for our first morning in Fianarantsoa. Our arrival was perfectly timed so that we could attend the entire Ny Tanintsika (the organization that the Scottish charity Feedback Madagascar set up on the ground in Madagascar; pronounced “Nee Tee-nahn-tseek”) team meeting, which included everyone from the office, plus the field agents. It was a large group, perhaps 30ish people, so we couldn’t all fit in the office. Instead, the meeting was held in a classroom at a nearby convent.
The meeting was almost entirely conducted in Malagasy, so even though Sam (our boss, who is British and fluent in Malagasy) translated a bit, we were still pretty lost. But what I can tell you about quite distinctly is the food!
At around 10am we had a break for tea, coffee, and snacks, which the nuns had prepared for us. The tea was lemony, and if you were pouring from the bottom you might end up with little green pieces of herb. Everyone was adding sugar cubes to theirs, but I found it just fine without the added sweetener. For snacks there were what looked like samosas (those savory triangular pastries of Indian cuisine; Indian empanadas, if you will) which had meat them, scallion pancakes (often found in Chinese cuisine; fried crispy and delicious!), and – get this – noodle sandwiches! That’s right: a piece of French baguette sliced lengthwise and filled with Asian-looking noodles! Talk about carbo-loading! Since there were also a few little pieces of fresh lettuce in the noodle sandwich, I abstained; I’m still not eating fresh produce unless it’s a peel-able fruit that comes from a tree. But the scallion pancakes were wonderful! You’ll often see them being sold on the side of the road, along with other fried items, or a plate of noodles; there were even some being sold behind the taxi-brousse kiosk in Tana. Of course, we were warned against buying non-packaged items from street vendors, so I was glad to get the chance to sample some local flavor, trusting that, perhaps by some diving power, the nuns’ food wouldn’t make me sick!
Around noon we breaked again for lunch. The nuns had laid out quite a spread! At each of the four or so tables there was a large pot of rice, a dish of cooked carrots and peas garnished with hardboiled eggs, a basket of bananas and tangerines (mandarines, which are delicious and in season and sold on every street corner and doorstep here) and a salad of some sort (looked like grated carrots and cabbage?). At each place setting there was a whole fish – head (with eyes!), tail, scales, and everything in between – as it was Friday. I served myself some rice and was passed a large bowl of water with greens (herbs?) in it; this was to add flavor to the rice, and it was really good! I also helped myself to the peas and carrots dish, and half a hardboiled egg (still proceeding carefully when it comes to food, especially since I had discovered that, should the need arise, the convent only had squat toilets). Content with my grain, cooked veggies, and protein source, I proceeded to enjoy myself…
Until suddenly, mid-bite, I felt a sickening crunch. I grimaced. Sam laughed.
“Oh, that’s something you have to remember when you buy rice from the market here. There might be gravel in it.”
We also got the chance to try a classic Malagasy beverage called ranon'ampango. Wikipedia describes it as a drink “made by adding water to the toasted rice left sticking to the interior of its cooking pot, and…served at every meal as a sanitary and tasty alternative to water.” It can vary in strength and intensity depending on how burnt the rice got in the pot; sometimes it is light-colored and opaque, while other times it is almost black. While we anticipated something interesting, it tastes exactly how you would expect it to taste – kind of like dirty, rice-y water. Yuck. At least we can say we tried it!