The first big sociological change in the consumption of mutura in Kenya was driven by the British colonial government’s employment and housing policies, which transformed mutura from being a mostly ceremonial and religious food for the Gikuyu into one of the country’s main street foods. Now, I wonder if mutura is one of the things to which COVID-19 will bring permanent change. Will more people start ordering mutura online, to be delivered into their houses? Will people start making and grilling mutura from the comfort of their homes? Will mutura places become hygienic places, with handwashing stations, and utensils being washed, and mutura served as if in a proper restaurant, even though clean mutura isn’t mutura? Me, I don’t know.

Yesterday, I got out of the house, in search of mutura. All my places were closed. It was six, and people were rushing home to beat the curfew, which starts at seven, everyone with a face mask over their mouth. I walked. No mutura. Walked some more. Still no mutura. I walked some more. Near my neighborhood, there is a sea of open-air garages. There, in the middle of the garages, surrounded by cars on all sides, were two mutura sellers. Around both of them, a clergy of mutura seekers, each with their face masks slipped down to their chins, munching on mutura. I walked over.

We talk some more. “Usually these guys open late in the afternoon, saa za ulevi,” he says. “But now with the curfew, they have a very small window in which to sell the stock.”

Mutura, mara, smokies, and other Kenyan street foods rely on very strict market bases: First, they rely on the evening crowd, people on their way home from work, who buy them before they get back to the house for their real food; then, they rely on the folks out drinking, saa za ulevi (when people are drinking), which is why a lot of mutura is usually sold near bars. The curfew in effect in Kenya means that mutura sellers have a window of an hour, maybe two, in which to sell off their stock. This, coupled with the fact that people are rushing to get home, means that for many mutura sellers, it isn’t worth the risk.

Furthermore, making mutura is a specific skill, a skill that is slowly becoming harder to come by. Mutura has to be made by hand, unlike smokies, which can be industrially produced. Moreover, unlike the Farmer’s Choice smokies, mutura doesn’t have preservatives and so can’t be mass-produced. Even posh and/or colonial establishments that are gentrifying the product face this problem, and so, for them, mutura is mostly only served on special occasions, such as weddings.

Nevertheless, we go on. We mutura lovers persist.

I go to my mutura place.

“Niekee ya forty,” I tell my mutura guy.

That was then.

Now, things are different. Now, Nairobi is shut down because of COVID-19. Travel in and out of the city is banned, and there’s a countrywide curfew from dusk to dawn. Social distancing regulations announced by the government early during Kenya’s infection mean that restaurants and eateries remain closed, unless they meet stringent health requirements.

I walk around my neighborhood in the evenings. All the mutura joints are closed. I call Clifton, ask him if he’s been able to eat mutura ever since all of this began.

“No,” he tells me. “All my usual guys are closed.”

This is what I know: I miss mutura. I miss the easy banter at the mutura place, people talking about their lives, maybe football, maybe how they are going to go out that night. I miss the mutura sellers flirting with some of their customers, cutting them mutura in lieu of verbal flirting. I miss the babas who come in with their big cars and their big bellies, park by the side of the road, and order mutura for 200 bob because big man, big food. I miss the little kids who come in, feeding on a new taste, and the other customers shouting at the seller not to add chile, because these are kids, can you not see? I miss my friend, M., calling me, asking if I’m in the house, and driving over so that we can go to my mutura base, where he will say such things as, “Mutura is like sex.”

Of course, these illicit joys and pleasures are a risk. Apart from the choirs of bacteria allegedly present in mutura, the mutura vendors rarely have cashiers to handle money, and so the hands that serve you mutura are the same ones that handle currency all evening long. This leads to consumers opting for products that, while similar to mutura, don’t carry the same risks. Data scientist Chris Orwa argues that, “The product came into existence to serve a need—the need to provide a protein source for low-income earners—and it quickly became popular with dwellers of informal settlement due to the low price point and the need to bridge a dietary deficiency. For a long time, this market segment existed without any competition and, in fact, became a de-facto standard for low-priced meat products. Then came in the big brand name, “Farmer’s Choice,” with its “smokie” sausages that are not only tastier but also rival the price point of mutura. Not only that, the new “smokie” vendors have more hygienic equipment and with that hygiene and the brand reputation of Farmer’s Choice comes a sense of trust that is lacking in the case of mutura.”

Then, the other rules of eating mutura. Fatty mutura, you can’t eat it when it’s cold. All mutura, you eat with your hands, not with a fork. Custom allows the use of a toothpick sometimes, but only reluctantly. The little ones at the mutura place, you feed them first. You always call for another round (“niongeze nyingine”) regardless of any prior predilections. And, finally, the best mutura is the one eaten in the cold, after a long hike on the foothills of one of the many mountains that skirt the Rift Valley, in a little hut where the kikuyu flies over your head, with a steaming cup of soup to which the chile you’ll add gives it that perfect monster kick.

Here’s a story: Last year, walking in town with N., we bumped into Eddie B. Listen, I told N., this guy, Eddie B., he’s the one who introduced me to mutura. This happened in Kisumu, in ‘07. That year there was post-election violence in Kisumu, sawa, people’s houses being burnt, businesses being looted, protestors being shot in the streets, but there was also mutura, and the illicit joys and pleasures it carried.

Cutting mutura is an art. Mr. Mutura Server selects a roll of mutuch, lifts it off the fire, and onto the board next to the stove. Next, he approximates forty shillings worth of the stuff, cuts it off and returns the rest to the flame. He then slices it, each piece roughly the size of a plastic bottle cap, each piece brown and sizzling. The surface of the mutura, nicely dried, is a darkly browned crust, slightly charred, contrasting with the crumbly meat underneath. In your mouth, it crumbles, the innards spicy with a slightly greasy flavor, the fat soft and succulent and rich, and the garlic and cilantro and scallions and chile giving you an ambrosial kick. Around you the smoke from the mutura on the grill rises, flooring you. I think of Edward Lee, who, in Smoke & Pickles, writes, “Some say umami is the fifth [taste], in addition to salty, sweet, sour and bitter. I say smoke is the sixth.”

Some kachumbari sprinkled on top, for the culture. The tomatoes in the kachumbari are loud, as are the onions, and the coriander, and more chiles, but not overloud, and they and the mutura, instead of rushing into and attacking each other, overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges. I eat, we eat, all of us, our big happy mutura family.

Although Nairobi had been occupied by the Maasai before the coming of the white man, during the colonial period, the African settlements in the city were largely dominated by members of the Agikuyu community. In fact, during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, these Agikuyu were the target of Operation Anvil, an anti-Gikuyu crusade by the colonial administration. The influx of the Agikuyu into the city from Central Kenya and the colonial government’s apartheid housing policies, meant that the Agikuyu as well as other African communities were corralled into cramped housing units in estates such as Bahati, Kaloleni, and Pumwani. Because of the close proximity these communities shared, their respective cultures mixed with one another, and they acquired each other’s cultural habits. Thus, mutura slowly stopped being only Kikuyu fare and was picked up by the other communities. Like, twenty shillings, the first round; then, another twenty. And another. And another. This happens regardless of how much mutura one wanted to have beforehand. Clifton, a veteran mutura eater, tells me, “I always do ya twenty. Then add another.

Walking through parts of the city after dusk, especially streets in lower- and middle-income neighborhoods, one will often find groups of people eating mutura. The setup is normally the same: Mr. Mutura Server (almost always mister, for reasons I don’t fully understand), clad in a white lab coat with flecks of blood on it (anything less cannot be trusted) and gumboots, works on a grill, atop which are placed rolls of mutura. Sometimes, there is soup nearby, the soup being a liquid made from crushed goat and cow hooves that are boiled—an acclaimed hangover cure, according to mutura enthusiasts. Coalesced around the mutura server is a crowd of people, maybe three people, maybe eight people for the very popular mutura sellers. Behind them, there is always a road, because mutura is always eaten amid a cacophony of vehicular sounds and dust. Sometimes mara. Nowadays they don’t do ten bob. But it also depends on the type of mutuch [mutura]. There’s the really thick ones that are filling and then the slim ones, the ones that crumble when you try to cut. I can do for sixty those.”

Among the Gikuyu, mutura was not the only type of ndundiro, or sausage. The community also had ngerima, whose only dissimilarity with mutura was that one was made from the intestines while the other was made from the omasum. Ngerima, shaped like an oval ball, was also known as “thenga twarie,” which in the Kikuyu language means “Go away we want to talk privately.” It was called this because the old men of the village, in a bid to make sure that the glories of eating it remained theirs, would tell their wives and children to go away because they wanted to talk privately. Then, the rest of the intestines, the ones that hadn’t been used up when making the mutura, were roasted plain without anything stuffed inside them; this was known as mara. Sometimes, one eats mutura along with kachumbari, a salad made from tomatoes, onions, chiles, and parsley, and sometimes not. But one will always ask for the mutura bit by bit.

One consequence of the colonial government’s anti-African housing and employment policies was that the areas of the city in which the Africans lived acquired the reputation of being “slums,” or enclaves of poor people, and carried with that reputation its attendant myths. As outlined by the non-profit Share the World’s Resources, the first myth is that there are too many people in slums, the second that the poor are to blame, and the third that slums are places of crime, violence, and social degradation. After independence, the African government in power in Kenya made few attempts to end the discriminatory housing policies, and so mutura, as well as all the other practices of the African quarters, remained as something to be sneered at by the urbane and educated in Nairobi, and the idea of mutura as food for poor people persisted. To this day, mutura is only sold in certain areas in Nairobi, and these are rarely, if ever, upper-class residential areas.

Listen, eating mutura is death: When you eat it, you sense all the cholesterol, all the high blood pressure, all the heart disease, reaching out and yanking you into your grave. In fact, a report by researchers at the University of Nairobi was blunt in cautioning about the dangers of mutura, saying, among other things, “Our study shows roasted and non-roasted African sausages sold in meat outlets in Nairobi County are contaminated with staphylococcus, bacillus, streptococcus, proteus, and E. coli organisms.” Partaking in the glories of mutura means potentially acquiring a who’s who of bacterial killers.

But the illicitness of mutura is the point, and it adds glory to the entire experience: eating it under cover of darkness; eating it by the side of the road; eating it with your hands, which are, more likely than not, unwashed; and not thinking about where the meat is gotten from, especially since meat in Nairobi is under a lot of scrutiny for having failed numerous health checks; it’s all part of the deal. The first time I discovered mutura as an 11-year-old in Kisumu, I knew instinctively that my parents wouldn’t approve, and so I ate it with delight.

However, its illicit appeal can work against it. To some, it is non grata for a number of reasons: because of poor hygiene practices among mutura sellers; because “do you even know what’s in it?”; because of the myriad risks one takes with every bite of mutura; because of the idea that mutura is “poor-people food”; because of every manner of logical and pseudo-logical argument against its intake. Indeed, as my friend W. tells me, “I think the idea of it ruined the taste before I could even give it a chance.”

It wasn’t always so. In its autochthonic form among the Agikuyu community, mutura occupied a place of honor, as Jmburus describes on his blog, in talking about goat-eating traditions among the Agikuyu. Mutura was prepared only during special occasions, such as ruracios (dowry-payment ceremonies) and weddings. It was prepared by men, but only women were supposed to eat it; the men would eat the other parts of the slaughtered animal.

This is what used to happen: After a goat was slaughtered, its throat was sliced open and the blood collected in a bucket or container with salt. The salt ensured the blood remained in its jelly-like form, rather than clotting up in globs. The neck and back of the slaughtered animal were cut up into small pieces and cooked together with vegetables, such as eggplants, carrots, onions, coriander, carrots, bell peppers, chiles, and bitter herbs. Next, the excess fat from under the animal’s skin and tail, together with the previously collected salted blood, would be added to this mixture, and then the whole thing would be fried under low heat. Once cooked, this mixture is what would be stuffed into the intestines.

The intestines themselves had to have been cleaned before anything could be put into them. This was done using a process called kúmiria mara, where the unprocessed food in the intestines would be squeezed out downward from the stomach end to the rectum end and then the tubes were washed out. This process ensured that the intestines were cleaned up without being pierced. Nowadays, what happens is that a hose is attached to one end and then water pumps out whatever’s inside the intestines—the joys of modern technology. After the intestines were stuffed, the mutura was then either roasted directly or, before the roasting, boiled together with the head and lower legs (mathagiro) of the goat. The sausage was then roasted until its exterior achieved a golden brown.

Mutura, a Kenyan spiced goat sausage enriched with the blood, has a complicated history and a controversial reputation. But to love mutura is to love the culture that surrounds it.
Listen. In the beginning, there was mutura.

Mutura—viz., a fire-grilled delicacy made from goat and/or cow and/or lamb intestines sewn together and stuffed with a mixture bound by fresh blood (and, among the Maasai, laced with fat that melts when you grill it)—is part of the global tradition of blood sausages. Ireland has black pudding, France has boudin noir, South Korea has soondae, and Spain has morcilla. Kenya has mutura.

Sometimes translated into English as “African blood sausage” in that mannerless way we have of translating non-English things into English, mutura is richer than its European relatives, as it’s packed with a powerful blend of spices. Mutura will have ginger; it will have garlic; it will have scallions, cilantro, and chile so fine and wonderful a person weeps for joy while eating it. Nothing else matters. Expositions about Kenyan food will talk about nyama choma, ugali, chapati, etc. But mutura, that’s where it’s at.

Breakfast cereal as a thing can be attributed to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, an acclaimed Seventh-Day Adventist health and wellness resort in Michigan. “If you were upper-middle class and above, it was a fashionable place to go get treated for a variety of maladies, or just to go for your general health,” says Lohman. Kellogg, a staunch vegetarian who was especially interested in bowel movements, advocated eating everything from seaweed to yogurt to nuts and grains—a radical turn from America’s meat-centric diet. Of course, most of us know the Kellogg name from Corn Flakes, which, the story goes, were first invented at “The San” after some dough turned stale and they tried to bake it anyway.

That same year, Dr. Kellogg and his brother Will began experimenting with various ready-to-eat grain flakes, and packaging them for sale. A box of Granose Flakes from 1898 simply stated “ENRICH THE BLOOD,” a reference to the nutritional benefits the Kelloggs attributed to a vegetarian, grain-filled diet. This message was central to early cereal packaging, when brands were fighting not just for shelf space, but to convince the average American to do away with that traditional, meat-laden six-course breakfast.

Chances are, it’s never struck you as particularly odd that there’s an entire supermarket aisle devoted to nothing but cereal. For most of us, cereal is the ultimate convenient breakfast, and even the most sugary of varieties claim to offer nutritional benefits and a balanced start to your day. Every brand is trying to convince you it’s something different, something better, and there’s probably at least one you’re buying into. The “kids only” sugar bombs boast whole grains, and Special K comes studded with chocolate bits and sweet yogurt clusters.

But it wasn’t always that way. Cereal’s position as America’s default breakfast food is a remarkable feat, not of flavor or culture, but of marketing and packaging design. It’s a century-long history of advertising, a brilliant campaign that capitalized on the intersection of industrialization, health-consciousness, and changing class attitudes that completely upended the way Americans ate. And it all began at a moment when products were primed to transcend regional tastes through the rise of mass-marketing.

We’re starting to hear those discussions around corned beef egg roll purveyors, too. As with the later generations of Detroit pizza makers, you’ll find chefs’ unique imprints on the dish at different spots throughout the area. In some restaurants, they’re referred to as “Reuben” or “Irish” egg rolls. One example of the latter, at McShane’s Irish Pub, includes potato. It’s a minor addition, and it’s still a corned beef egg roll at its core, but it’s clearly a McShane’s roll. And that sort of evolution is a sign that Detroit’s own egg roll is growing into something more than just a beloved local delicacy—it’s well on its way to becoming southeast Michigan’s next regional dish. Cereal as Health Food
“America at the turn of the century was just as vast and varied as it is now,” explains historic gastronomist Sarah Lohman. “Fannie Farmer’s The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, from 1906, which I think is a decent judge of what the average, multi-generational, Midwestern or New England American family is eating or aspiring to eat, is showing a meal that includes: fruit; hot cereal like Quaker oats or hominy; a substantial meat like beefsteak, ‘warmed over lamb,’ or broiled halibut; potatoes, toast, or muffins; or, of course, coffee.” In other words, a breakfast of just hominy or porridge was considered a nutritionally unbalanced poor family’s breakfast—not exactly something you’d aspire to. Cereal changed all of that.

Mr. Lee nearly shouts when I ask if the corned beef egg roll could be southeast Michigan’s next staple. “As big as the coney dog! It will be up there and beyond, no doubt about it, no question about it! This is big stuff. I’ve got people coming in and they’ll order five, 10, 15 at a time.”

To determine whether his prediction may come true, it helps to take a look at Detroit’s other iconic foodstuffs. As brilliant as the invention of the coney dog was, it wasn’t until a number of establishments had replicated it that it became a regional delicacy, one that’s since become a point of pride among Detroiters—something over which we don’t just agree, but bond.

The corned beef egg roll is not yet a Great Uniter. Instead, its current stage of development invites comparisons to Detroit-style pizza, which was invented just after World War II at Buddy’s Pizza, a former speakeasy turned dive bar/pizzeria. In an appropriately Detroit move, chefs at Buddy’s baked the pizzas in repurposed blue steel utility trays designed for parts storage at local auto factories. The best pizzerias in the city today are directly or indirectly linked to that shop, and still use those trays. As a Buddy’s corporate manager once told me, “Detroit-style pizza is actually Buddy’s pizza.”

But over the decades, the more ambitious chefs and managers from Buddy’s struck out on their own, launching formidable spots like Loui’s in the early ‘70s. Those kitchens are breeding still more chefs, and even national brands, such as Jet’s, offer a fast-food take on Detroit-style pizza. Some argue that the second-generation shops, like Loui’s, are superior due to their more liberal application of Wisconsin Brick cheese, and the fact that it’s cubed instead of shredded, which results in a better melt. Loui’s customers also point out that the dough is lighter, more focaccia-like, but simultaneously thick and sturdy enough as a base to support a pound of cheese. Some say Loui’s is superior because its owners chose not to expand, while the quality of Buddy’s pizza suffered when it grew into a local chain. Though this isn’t the forum for a discussion of which pizza is the best, the ongoing debate over the relative merits and demerits of different incarnations of Detroit-style pizza is the kind that one hears only around a significant regional dish.

Asian Corned Beef’s rolls are thick-shelled, and the cheese plays a relatively minor role compared with the rolls sold in other shops, like Mr. Fo-Fo’s, which also serves some of the best in Detroit. For some insight into the finer points involved, Mr. Fo-Fo’s co-owner Otis Lee, who goes by Mr. Lee, recently provided me with a demo of corned beef egg roll assembly. To stress the importance of clean grease, he pulled a roll out of the fryer and cut it open, noting the air pocket between the filling and the top of the casing. If the grease were dirty, he said, the shell would collapse, and the whole thing would end up soggy and heavy. When fried correctly, Mr. Lee told me, the casings are light, crisp, and surprisingly un-greasy to the touch. Indeed, his sample egg roll, for having just been pulled out of boiling oil, felt unexpectedly dry to me, almost like it was covered in peach fuzz. Mr. Fo-Fo’s laces the meat with more shredded cheese than most shops, which, along with the generous beef portions, make these the biggest rolls in Detroit—though they’re also slightly more expensive, at $4 each. Because of their size, Mr. Fo-Fo’s doesn’t label them “egg rolls”—instead, they’re “fried grinders” or sandwiches, because “that’s more what they are,” Mr. Lee’s son, Keith, explained.

After peeling the cloves, I always split them in half lengthwise and remove the germ, as the little sprout in the center can leave a noticeable sharpness in raw applications. (Read my article on removing the garlic germ for a more in-depth explanation.)

I process the cloves in a food processor, along with kosher salt for some added friction. Initially, the chopped garlic will want to spray along the sides of the bowl, so you have to frequently stop to scrape down the sides, pulsing until the garlic is completely puréed. The garlic needs to be fully broken down in order for the proteins and stabilizers to be released from within its cell walls.

Once the garlic is smooth, I blend in only some of the fresh lemon juice. With mayo, all of the liquid can be added at the start because the egg is such a strong emulsifier. But because garlic is a weaker emulsifier, we need all the help we can get, and keeping the paste thick creates more drag on the oil droplets, helping to keep them apart.

An emulsion always involves two incompatible liquids that are brought together by dispersing one into tiny droplets suspended throughout the other. This can be done with vigorous shaking and agitation—as when you’re whisking oil into a vinaigrette—but without an emulsifier, the coupling is only temporary. Emulsifiers and stabilizers help these droplets stay dispersed by coating each one and reducing the surface tension, preventing them from coalescing.

Mayo is such a stable emulsion because the lecithin and proteins in an egg are some of the most powerful emulsifiers around. One egg is capable of emulsifying one gallon of oil, resulting in a stiff and spreadable sauce. A properly made toum will be just as thick and densely packed with billions of oil droplets, but it’s all held together with the far less stable proteins and pulverized plant tissues of garlic. This makes bringing toum together a more delicate process than making mayo, but with some patience, you can easily avoid pitfalls.

How to Make Toum
This first step is to make a smooth and fluffy garlic paste. Start with the freshest garlic for the most flavorful toum: Pre-peeled cloves sold in bulk lose much of their pungency, while old, sprouting heads of garlic can be bitter and harsh. Look for firm, tight heads with no signs of bruising or sprouting.

If using yogurt and milk, start at least 3 hours and up to a day in advance by

placing both in a bowl. Whisk well and leave in a cool place or in the fridge

until bubbles form on the surface. What you get is a kind of homemade buttermilk, but less sour.

Tear the bread into bite-size pieces and place in a large mixing bowl. Add

your fermented yogurt mixture or commercial buttermilk, followed by the rest

of the ingredients, mix well, and leave for 10 minutes for all the flavors to

combine.

Spoon the fattoush into serving bowls, drizzle with some olive oil, and garnish generously with sumac.

How to make toum, the powerful Lebanese garlic condiment, at home in your food processor, and what to do if it breaks. Whenever my husband and I order delivery from our favorite Lebanese place, the center of the meal isn’t the chicken shawarma or the mixed grill for two—it’s the potent garlic sauce, toum. Despite my desperate messages for extra toum, they never pack more than three two-ounce containers of the stuff. I carefully ration the precious substance, but my husband mindlessly finishes his tub and a half and descends onto my share, leaving me forced to recalibrate each of my smears and paw hysterically at empty containers.