Botswana is apparently best known at the moment as the setting of Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, though it’s better known amongst economists as one of Africa’s great success stories – an anomaly of free elections and competently-managed infrastructure amidst a sea of murderous dictatorships and suicidal civil wars. In fact the place has “a standard of living around that of Mexico or Turkey” – no mean feat for a landlocked African nation on the doorsteps of total basket-cases like Angola and Zimbabwe.
As for the staple diet – according to multiple sources the big deal food is “Seswaa“, a shredded meat dish served with polenta (or more authentically still some sort of porridge we had no chance of finding) and green veg.
Seswaa is not hard to make. Take some casserole beef, boil it for hours and hours until it doesn’t taste of anything, and then mash it to a pulp. Nor is polenta – take some cornmeal and, likewise, boil it up until it doesn’t taste of anything (the big positive aspect of polenta being that this takes only a few minutes rather than the several hours one spends on the meat).
And thus, one is left with some meat and some carbs, neither of which taste of anything very much at all. Issa had hers with mustard and ketchup, which made it taste of mustard and ketchup. I had mine with lots of onions, so mine tasted of onions. I remain perplexed as to what the point of that might have been, or why an entire nation allegedly regards this as a sensible choice for their flagship dish.
Mange Two 