Post 19 Creative solutions to food dilemmas

Butter  

It was the custom of the people always to make any trip pay for itself.  The usual profit margin on anything they brought back and sold was 100%.  

Don Oscar Giese, son of a German father and a Bolivian mother, was an innovative and enterprising fellow. From time to time he or his wife made trips to Cochabamba and brought back odds and ends to sell from the front door of their house, not far from where we lived.  

Sometimes they also had items from their cattle ranch to sell, and on one occasion they had home-made butter. As tinned butter was expensive and did not taste very good, we preferred to go without it.  However, we decided to indulge in a small quantity of the fresh stuff even though the price was very high.  

Because of the risk of dysentery, we brought the butter to the boil in a saucepan, strained it, then let it cool out again.  The straining produced a lump of paper and a couple of flies, otherwise the butter tasted all right even though it did not look as palatable after being boiled.  We enjoyed having butter on our bread again.

Cheese

When Jim was away on a trip I walked to the plaza to collect the mail, and on the way home as I passed Giese's house I saw a big block of locally-made cheese, so asked to buy a piece.  It was duly handed to me, wrapped in newspaper.  

The cheese was porous in texture, fairly dry and crumbly, white in colour except for occasional black specks of grit or dirt. We knew that, as far as we were concerned, it was only safe to eat when cooked.  

On arrival home I took the cheese out of the newspaper wrapping and to my horror found that it was riddled with tunnels full of maggots.  My stomach heaved but I managed to get the cheese back into the newspaper and headed for Giese's place, where Mrs Giese found it hard to understand that I did not want it because of the maggots!  

Nevertheless, she obligingly acceded to my request for its value in rice.  After that experience we always looked carefully at the local cheese before buying it, but rarely was it free from even a few maggots.  

I found that an easy way of dealing with them was to place the slab of cheese in a warm oven and then, when the maggots were lifeless, to break the cheese into pieces and remove the little bodies. 

Besides being a valuable asset to a limited diet, the cheese helped to bring some variation into the monotonous menu. We enjoyed it cooked into a savoury rice custard, incorporated in onion-top fritters, or baked in several different ways with cooking-bananas (plantains).

Flour

Living through our first wet season in the Beni had brought a few trying experiences.  To our dismay we discovered that in our 100lb sack of flour great quantities of tiny fine grubs had hatched out, due to the heat and humidity. 

We could not afford to throw it away, so each night before the bread-making day, Jim and I sat at the table and by the light of the kerosene power lamp we sifted and re-sifted the flour.

Even then we ended up with plenty of little "foreign" bodies in our loaves of bread.  The task was daunting, but eventually we were able to buy some tins with close-fitting press-in lids, into which we sealed our grubby flour.  

By filling the tins right to the very top, excluding almost all the air, we found that the grubs came to the top of the tins and then died.  Later, as we opened each tin, we scooped off a few solid inches of maybe millions of tiny dead bodies, and the remainder of the flour was comparatively clear of grubs.  

However, we were very thankful when the flour was used up as it was gradually developing quite a sour flavour. We learned to keep our flour sealed from the humid atmosphere the moment it arrived in the Beni.

Peaches

Some few years later, we received a lovely gift of a box of dried peaches from our missionary friends, the Ekdahls, in Cochabamba.  The peaches were grown and dried in the Cochabamba valley, and though of a very dark brown colour because of the method of processing, they had a good flavour and were a welcome change in our diet.  

From the previous experience with our flour, we immediately put the peaches into tins, but a little later found that grubs had hatched out and were making inroads into our precious peaches.  So, after heating the peaches in a warm oven to kill the grubs, and hopefully any trace of future hatchings, we cleared out all the grubs and re-sealed the fruit in the tins.

Honey

It had seemed a good idea to purchase a bulk tin of honey from Cochabamba, and it came down in the cargo order with the flour and sugar in the early weeks of 1950 during the rainy season. 

The tin was kept sealed from ants, just being opened when we filled a jar from time to time. After a while we were amazed to find that the honey had gone bad, and there was still at least half a tin unused.  

For months we just left it pushed away in a corner, knowing that it had to be thrown away but feeling very upset at the thought of doing so because of the waste of money.  

Finally we decided that it was useless hanging onto the tin of honey any longer, so Jim took it right away up the back yard to the farthest corner where he removed the lid and tipped the tin upside down.  

Out ran a quantity of fluid, and when Jim looked into the tin to see why nothing more was coming out, he found half a tin of solid candied honey.  Apparently the honey had purified itself over a period of time, and we were able to enjoy good honey right to the bottom of the tin!