Recipe: Amadou’s Spaghetti Lettuce Sandwiches

When Amadou was little, he cooked “every day” with one of the volunteers living here before me. “What did you cook?” “Sometimes African, sometimes American. When it was American we cooked spaghetti, like this.” So perhaps I have Bakary Jallow, of forgotten American name, to thank for the following recipe.

Amadou’s Spaghetti Lettuce Sandwiches

Serves: However many people show up.

Ingredients: Bag of lettuce, two cups vinegar, medium-sized onion, package of spaghetti, one of those packets of tomato paste, a cube of Maggi seasoning, four loaves of bread, two pinches of salt.

1. Put the lettuce leaves into a plastic bowl barely large enough to contain them all. Pour the vinegar on top. Cover with a plate.
2.  Boil water for the spaghetti. Add a pinch of salt. Stir occasionally using a “spoon which has nails.”
3. Slice the onion and mix with the lettuce. Cover again with the plate—the lettuce is not dead yet.
4. When most of the water has evaporated from the spaghetti, taste a little of the remaining water. “Are you having any more salt?” Add another pinch of salt.
5. The spaghetti is ready when someone who prefers her pasta al dente would call it a soggy mess. Turn off the gas. Leave the spaghetti in the pot. Do not drain the water.  
6. By now, both the lettuce and onions should have died. Uncover them, and sample a leaf. Sample another leaf. You think it is dead, but call your mother in to be sure. Have your mother sample a leaf. She will confirm that the lettuce and onion are both dead.
7. Add the tomato paste to the spaghetti and stir with the spoon with nails.
8. Crush the Maggi cube over the spaghetti and stir. 

To serve: Slice the bread lengthwise once, and then crosswise as many times as is needed to give each person a piece. Put some of the lettuce-onion-vinegar mixture inside, then put the spaghetti on top. When the bread is finished, eat the remaining sauce and lettuce with your hands.

Variation: If you have sardines and a cup of oil, you can somehow add these to the mix. It will be “very sweet.”