Saved by YouTube

Bread ‘killed’ me for six days and on the last day YouTube saved me. Actually, Julie Hjorth — my Danish sister from another mother — did, thanks to videos she’d seen online. To understand this doomsday scenario, let’s track back a bit. I visited Denmark on a scholarship to attend the Women Deliver Conference in […]

Bread ‘killed’ me for six days and on the last day YouTube saved me. Actually, Julie Hjorth — my Danish sister from another mother — did, thanks to videos she’d seen online.

To understand this doomsday scenario, let’s track back a bit. I visited Denmark on a scholarship to attend the Women Deliver Conference in Copenhagen in May. The hotel was excellent, the weather was drop-dead cold and the food was fantastically horrible to me.

I don’t mean to diss Danish cuisine, I don’t know enough about it to do so, but I quickly ran out of patience with bread. It was everywhere and everything.

Lunch came steady as clockwork every day. The conference was so efficiently organised, it was frightening. At exactly 12 noon, while plenaries and briefings went on, armies of young men and women in black and white wheel trolleys packed with brown paper bags. The bags are sorted onto tables throughout the conference centre and labelled carefully, according to their content.

Spelt sandwich with halal chicken, curry crème, carrots, cucumber and tomatoes, followed by coke stick, raw bar, fresh fruit and water. The contents varied with eating preferences -vegetarian or nonveg. All you needed was to grab a bag and bite in.

After days of this unvarying diet, I was sick of bread. The carrots and apples and bananas were all good, but I didn’t want to see another loaf in my life. I moaned and whined about it at every chance. One editor told me I was turning a bread specialist. I said bread may as well sprout from my head.

I wasn’t alone. Every Nigerian I met was groaning too.

So imagine my utter shock when Hjorth put me between a rock and a hard place with a simple question: “Would you care for eba or rice?”

I was in her home, along with four other Nigerians. Her husband and his friend had picked us from the hotel and brought us to their home to visit.

Our answer was unanimous. Whichever was available was fantastically fine by us. I had craved home food for ages, it seemed too good to be true.

What else seemed too good to be true was watching Hjorth set to making egusi soup. “I can make egusi, ogbono and-what’s the other one, the one with a lot of vegetables inside…”

“Edikang ikong?” I suggested.

“It has no meat,” she went on, then got help from another guest. “Ewedu.”

She learnt to make Nigerian soup by watching online videos. “There’s this woman on YouTube,” Hjorth says. “I think she’s very well known, for foreigners. She does everything easily, for you to understand, if you are not from Nigeria. She picks, for instance, a tomato and tells you it is called this and this and this in different countries. So you are caught up.”

The woman in question is a Nigerian living in the US and using online videos to teach recipes.

Hjorth assembles the ingredients she buys in an “African shop in the city centre,” she says, then sits to the cooking video. She watches, pauses, repeats her action, hits play again. The process is tasking, but rewarding.

Her husband Nurudeen and I took turns holding their chubby eight-month-old daughter. I went from a sofa in their white-walled living room to the veranda to marvel how it was still daylight at nearly 10 pm.

After life in Lagos, Nurudeen had lived a couple of years in Copenhagen, worked and made a comfortable life with his fellow-engineer wife. Hjorth had never been to Nigeria, and she jokes about coming if only she could find a house with a pool.

“It is more expensive to cook for foreign guests,” she says, and I agree. I imagine import duties will hike up the price of egusi in the middle of Copenhagen. Ogbono costs an arm and a leg these days at Wuse Market.

But it gives Hjorth joy to cook for foreign guests, she says. Her husband likes it. “If he requests something specific, like he’s been telling me all week, ‘I want to eat this particular food,’ then I say, let’s go get the ingredients. He loves Danish food also. He can eat anything I make.”

Heated oil swills through the living room and the aroma wafts after it, like in those TV commercials for seasoning. It still seems baffling until a bowl of eba is placed on the table and dished up. The soup bowl follows and real people actually sit at the table.

The colours, the textures, the aroma, and a roomful of guests was already swallowing and licking their chops.

I thanked her for the experience. She said she couldn’t take credit for it. All I could think was, if you know what I’ve been through with bread.