The city of Dassa-Zoumé is about halfway between Cotonou and Natitingou in Benin, and it pops up just about when your stomach starts to grumble on the day-long trip. Our colleagues, Dr Sam Bodjrenou and Dr Malika Bankole of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, knew just the place for lunch, so we stopped at a roadside kitchen for a feed.
Malika suggested something about eating yams and groundnuts, and Scott and I said OK, not really knowing what we were going to eat. A short time later we saw three women trying to massacre a ball of dough.
Lunch was presented to us, but we really didn’t know what to do with it, so Malika gave us a tutorial. She explained that we were eating agoun, a typical dish of Benin. It’s made from white yams, which are pounded in a mortar into a smooth dough. The agoun is served with a peanut sauce, wild partridge for the meat, some cow’s-milk cheese (wagashi) and jute mallow to add to the stickiness.
The three women really worked up a sweat pounding the yams, but we truly enjoyed the fruits of their efforts, which fuelled us for the rest of the day’s journey.
After an eight-hour drive we were rewarded with a sorghum beer in Benin’s interpretation of a ‘biergarten’ in Natitingou. There were no steins or oompah bands. Instead, rows of rough plank benches sat on bare earth under a corrugated-tin roof held up by timber posts, and the women selling tchoukoutou, the local sorghum beer, sat among their buckets and basins, each with her own batch. The beer is ladled with a plastic dipper into a calabash, a dried, halved gourd that makes a light, honey-coloured bowl. It was cloudy, slightly sour and only mildly alcoholic, and, after a long day on the road, just about perfect.
