In past travels abroad I have pined over the dearth of quality dessert and moved to desperation sought solace in spoonfuls of brownie batter. This summer, hoping to avoid a similarly excruciating experience, I arrived in Ghana with a half-dozen 70% cacao chocolate bars, their importance rivaled only by my passport and shot records. Yet, I needn’t have bothered, for I soon discovered, to my consternation, that the Lumana house had both an oven and a well-stocked kitchen—baked goods serving as an antidote to all yearnings for sweets—and that a short walk to town yielded access to cocoa powder and eggs, a treasure chest of circumstances which meant that another dessert dilemma need not be feared and that I was but a modicum of time and effort away from epicurean satisfaction.
In my time here, I haven’t quailed from the opportunity to add diversity to the monotonous cuisine, but rather have delighted and indulged in it, preparing crepes, banana pancakes, cinnamon cookies, pound cake, and peanut butter—or groundnut butter as it’s locally known—brownies on many a morning, afternoon, and evening, the scope of sweets limited only by my access to, and patience with, the finicky, uncommonly slow internet which provides recipes. Amidst this land of milk and honey, what could I possibly want? As it turns out…the milk.
For what is a brownie, a cookie, a banana pancake without a glass of milk to accompany it, but an incomplete, unperfected, pitiable treat that has yet to reach its potential? And how am I to maintain my health and the strength of my immune system, so as to ward off those ravenous tropical diseases which lie in wait for an opportune time when, weakened by lack of dairy, the white man falls easily to their influence, without my habitual thrice daily consumed cup of milk? Many an oddly named store I have visited in search of that most desirable of bovine beverages, meeting time and again milk in its most corrupted and forlorn states—powdered, evaporated, and soy. Bags of yellow powder, mixed with water, provide not even a simulacrum of the creamy, grassy, mild-sweetness milk, but only a watery, flavorless, too-sweet beverage, topped with yellow-tinged lumps. Cans of evaporated milk trace their origins to the same powder, and soy milk, the juice of a bean, serves as distinct and inferior “milk” which has stolen and shamed the term. Banished along with milk are all of its lovely progeny—cheese, yogurt, cream—such that one cannot find anywhere even a dose of dairy.