The drum stood at the corner where Aba Road meets the old Rumuola junction, half an oil barrel with holes punched in the sides and a grill made from a cut-up bed frame. Behind it stood a woman everyone called Mama Bole, though nobody remembered her real name.
Ibinabo was nine. Every evening on the way home from school she stopped and watched. The plantain had to be ripe but firm, yellow with a few black spots, never soft. Mama Bole peeled it with three cuts of a short knife and laid it straight on the coals, turning it with her fingers when the skin began to blister.
Nothing was measured
There was no recipe, no timer and no thermometer. The fish, usually croaker or a small catfish, was split, salted and brushed with palm oil and pepper. Mama Bole knew it was done by the sound it made and the way the skin pulled back from the bone.
The pepper sauce was the secret. Scotch bonnet, onions, a little palm oil and a spoonful of something from an old mayonnaise jar that she never explained. Ibinabo spent fifteen years trying to work it out. She thinks she is close.
What we kept
At Calabash, bole and fish opens the menu every night. We roast the plantain over charcoal in a drum in the yard, not in the kitchen, because the smoke matters. The fish is croaker from the Creek Road waterside. The pepper sauce is Ibinabo's best guess, and Port Harcourt guests tell us it is a good one.
Mama Bole's corner is a filling station now. But every evening, at junctions all over the city, someone is turning plantain over a drum with their fingers, and we think that is worth celebrating.
