Strange Diet Combo – Stella and Bread
In everyday Nigerian parlance, the word “combination”, regarding food, connotes meals that comprise unlikely combinations of food items. Meals are combinatorial products. chips and chicken. A stew made of vegetable oil, tomatoes, pepper, fish, and condiments. Or pineapple fried in batter. People without effort appreciate some of these combinations as customary, but others appear shocking and strange to them.
Look at a meal of Kola nut and corn pap! I have seen someone eat that and when I told some people about it; they said perhaps the guy was using it as a prescription of magical, traditional medicine. I have seen someone eat an ‘Amala sandwich’, bread, butter with a wrap of Amala in the middle! The first time I saw an uncle of mine eating ‘bread and coconut’ it was shocking, but a trial convinced me it was not bad at all. Even ‘rice and yam’ with stew seem odd to many people. While millions of other Nigerians eat it.
Drinks also have “combinations” such as Guinness and palm wine, ogogoro (local gin) and palm wine, burukutu and beer. Also, we have Guinness and evaporated milk (a rumoured aphrodisiac), red wine on orange juice, monkey tail (ogogoro and marijuana roots), Guinness and (non-alcoholic) malt, etc. Both Guinness and ogogoro (goscolene) are versatile ingredients in the “combination zone” especially for punches and aphrodisiacs.
I would not go into the cultural and historical reasons people eat certain “combinations” in Nigeria as meals today. Such may will generate unnecessary ill-humour about ethnicity. Health issues, the side-effects of medicines, alternative medicine prescriptions, peer pressure. But perhaps most of all, poverty causes people to eat strange combinations. I like ‘cheese and onion chocolate’ and ‘snail and chin-chin’.
The latest combination I have seen is the beer Stella and bread! And it happened in London! The reason behind that “combination” I may never know, but it wowed me all the same. Beer is bitter while bread is a little sweet. How it goes together in the mouth is worth try, just for curiosity.
‘There was a time people would consider Bread and Fanta’ (or Coke) “kiddies food” when children ate it but also “labourer’s food” since that was the most common break time meal/snack among adult menial labourers in Nigeria back in the day.
Whatever the combination is, the beer Stella and bread’? I hail O!
Grimot Nane
