Archaic Drinks: Sorghum Buza in Burundi
I’ve pulled this comment by Diana Buja on boza out of the comment section where it tends to stay hidden. Here’s what she has to say:
“I just got back a few days ago from doing some work in local markets in the east of Burundi, where an equivalent to buza is made of sorghum. It is low alcohol and high in nutrition. ‘Mamas’ – market ladies – Make this at home and bring it to the maket, where those who want a sip are given a long straw made of cattail or a similar, hollow reed. Then, you take a seat next to a big bucket of buza and sip till satiated. Usually up to 6 people will sit about a bucket, so it can be quite a social event.
But buza in the middle east is individually served and I’ve have very nice renditions in refugee camps in Sudan.”
One in a series on archaic drinks, largely grain drinks. What do I mean by archaic? That they are drinks that may very well go a very long way back in history but in many cases are gradually slipping out of use today.
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Here in Mexico the indigenous people make a mildly alcoholic drink from fermented corn and either agave juice or sugar or both. It is known as tesgüino, tesgüín, or tejuino depending upon the region. Occasionally you will find it being sold at a fair or small community festival, mostly as a nostalgic or novelty item. I have tried it and it isn’t bad.
Thanks Bob. I’ve heard about it but never seen it. One more reason to haunt small festivals.
There is a barley drink in Nepal which is called the local beer but, when I was in very small villages 30 years ago and received containers of the home brew, it bore no resemblance to the beer that I knew. Aside from the fact that it might be served warm rather than at room temperature it was very thick and chewy — something between a drink and a gruel — and had a slight alcoholic kick. Would this fall into the ‘antique drink’ category?
Forgot to say the chewy drink in Nepal and Tibet is called chang but the Himalayan chang is not at all like the “chang” you find in Thailand, which is recognizable as beer
It certainly would. Once I’m back with my library I’ll look up the books I have on food in that part of the world. But this sounds like exactly the kind of drink that was common in many parts of the world and is now almost forgotten.
Have just pulled this page up today; very interesting. On indigenous drinks being ‘chewy’, etc – yes; these kinds of fermented grains are actually very nutritious, and not intended to ready headiness!
I have collected a series of pictures of [mainly] beer-drinking that is of these kinds of drinks; they are – traditionally – very social and much more nutritious than today’ beers.
Hi Diana, how interesting. One reason why I am interested in these is that food historians and archaeologists, as you doubtless know, are doing a lot of work on early beers. Often, though, they seem to take as their point of comparison contemporary beer. I think this huge range of fermented grain drinks that seem to exist just below the scope of official recognition would probably make much better models.
Hello Rachel – Yes; in fact I was just thinking the other day, based lagely on my work here and elsewhere in Africa, that there is a continuum of what we call ‘beers’ [non-modern] that range from very slightly fermented to VERY fermented. It seems to be a feature of the industrialization process / history in which there emerges a stark division between ‘alcoholic’ and ‘non-alcoholic’ drinks.
And that may be linked to what you point out as the current tendancy to always compare ‘ancient’ beers with modern – rather than also with a variety of fermented drinks found in Africa and elsewhere. I.e., interpreting all beers as ‘real beers’ [if that makes sense]….
In any case, I was thinking abut this, while reading an article that was written about 50 years ago on pre-colonial and the [then] current features of Burundi and Rwandan societies. The article contained some very interesting observations on the role of sorghum beer in political and cultural contexts – and these sorghum beers are often a meal as well as a drink.
Diana you may know more then me on this. From memory I think that there are ancient Egyptian images showing beer making from barley dough? Basically bread dough is liquidized and strained and this results in the beer. Makes sense from the point of view that otherwise you have to develop a seperate technology of barley malting, where as this was beer is an of shoot of bread making technology.
There are some really wonderful articles of beer making in Ancient Egypt by Delwen Samuel, http://www.ancientgrains.org/
You might find them interesting Adam. And another stunning resource that compares Middle Eastern and Asian methods of fermentation is Huang’s volume in the Joseph Needham series on Science and Civilization in China. http://www.amazon.com/Science-Civilisation-China-Biological-Fermentations/dp/0521652707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212523847&sr=8-1Huang was a biochemist/food scientist and this is a tour de force. It costs an arm and a leg so you may want to look at it in a library.
Thanks for the links, Rachal; I know about Samuel’s work, but was not aware of the link to Needham. As I recall, Samuel answers Adams question in his excellent article > research…
Second, I’ve just finished reading a fascinating article on African cuisine written by one of Africa’s little-known but key french scholars of the mid-20th.C, Jean-Pierre Chretien. In it, there are some relevant remarks on local beer, and I quote them here: [the work was translated from French and published in 1988 in Diogenes. It deserves to be more widely known, because Dr. Chretien broadly debunks a great deal of what was – and continues to be – thought to be ‘traditional’ [unchanging] aspects of cuisine in Africa – including ‘beers’. Thearticle is available through SAGE on the web.
I especially appreciate his contextualizing of foods and drinks vis-a-vis social contexts, gender, etc.
Side note: Chretien’s remarks on ‘bitter tastes’ might be of interest to some of you; in another place, he points out that the word for ‘bitter’ and for ‘sweet’ is the same in the language here of kirundi. He suggests this is because sugar was quite recently introduced and was categorized as a ‘bitter’ taste [i.e., something that adds piquant – as does salt/bitter taste].
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The Historical Dimension of Alimentary Practices in Africa
Jean-Pierre Chretien
… Previously (and this can also no doubt be found in the history of European cuisines) good flavoring seems to have been based on bitterness, on combinations of bitter
vegetables, slightly rancid butter or dried meats, for example. This is the case in Burundi where one of the dishes enjoyed at family festivities, birunge, combined butter and vegetable such as colocasia leaves or a bitter spinach called isogi (Gynandropsis pentaphylla).
Today it is often said that there was no cuisine in this region of Africa, only boiled food. Tastes have simply changed and new recipes have come from the Indian Ocean coast, from Zaire or from Europe. The comparison with the manner in which beers were appreciated, especially sorghum beer, is also enlightening. To pay respect to a dignitary, a quality beer called umubaya was offered, marked by this bitter taste. The old man who told us this in northern Burundi in August 1981 compared it to the salt water enjoyed by cows, the very picture of happiness!
… “Relationship” is expressed at least as much in this common consumption [of sorghum beer] as in genealogies that only partially account for relationships that go beyond genealogy. In this respect it is useful to distinguish between food strictly speaking and drink. The latter is generally linked to expanded sociability, to groups of young people, to political receptions, to religious ceremonies, to the leisure time of hunters or village laborers. Elsewhere we have analyzed the duality of the ‘pitcher of beer’and the ‘pot of beans’ in ancient Burundi. On the one hand is a group of men, including an entire hillside neighborhood, sitting aroung pitchers set in the forecourt of the enclosure or at the entrance to the house, and drinking which facilitates speaking and decision making; on the other is the sociability controlled by women at the family level, around the hearth, in the most intimate room away from curious eyes. Even at the level of production (essentially sorghum and bananas for one sex, beans, sweet potatoes and corm for the other), a parallel duality can be found in the distribution of tasks and in taboos. It is not possible to describe the nutritional and gustatory qualities of these different products apart from the context that defines ‘good living’.
… Some foods (bread) and drinks (industrial beer or wine, in addition to other alcoholic beverages) are more ‘prestigious’than others, stamped with the mark of modernity, just as formerly a grain or a tuber could symbolize the solidarity of a community, with the
difference that these social inequalities are today creating a greater degree of separation in diets. A comparison of the nutritional qualities of older beers made of millet or sorghum with modem brewery beers would also be helpful for appreciating the distortions that have developed between ‘progress’and improvement…
Source: The Historical Dimension of Alimentary Practices in Africa, by Jean-Pierre Chretien
Diana,
Many thanks for this. Interesting on the difference between the sexes as well as on bitterness. On general grounds I am sure that he is right that cuisines in Africa have changed mightily. The more I read, the more I become convinced that most of the cuisines around today are of very recent invention, the last couple of hundred years, say. Often they incorporate dishes that are much older, of course, but the complex itself is new.