"What kind of meat is this?"

“What kind of meat is this?” Kenneth asks me. I assure him as I assured Amos not three minutes earlier that it was indeed chicken. “It’s not ‘bush meat’ is it?”
“Well, I didn’t see it get packed. But, it’s white meat.”

The three of us, Kenneth, Amos and I laugh. We have been having a continuing discussion of ‘bush meat’ for weeks. Bush meat is the meat of any animal you can find and kill ‘in the bush’ (the massive jungle that covers much of Liberia). Our main fear of eating bush meat is to accidentally eat monkey, because that smacks of cannibalism. I argue that monkey would be red meat and that at worst we would be eating on accident some other kind of bird.

It’s a joke of course. The supermarket doesn’t sell bush meat, for that you need to go to the open-air markets.

We finish laughing and turn to the task at hand, making peanut soup. It’s one of the important Liberian dishes.

As it turns out the peanut soup is pretty much the same as the pepper soup except you add in peanut butter to flavor the broth. Again it is taking me some time to understand the concept that the soup is named for the broth and not the type of meat in it. The meat is interchangeable even. It could be peanut soup with chicken or beef or goat or fish, and on many occasions multiple types of meat are used. It could be a fish beef peanut soup, maybe a stray piece of pork ended up in there too – It’s not important which meat is in the soup, the important thing is to make a good spicy broth. Also it is a must that you serve the soup with rice.

We have all of the spices. We have the meat, the onion, and the local hot peppers. We even have the local peanut butter that comes in small plastic bags. We are ready to cook.

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Same as last time the soup was almost too spicy for me. When we sat down to eat I relied on the rice to cool down my mouth between spoonfuls.

What I learned from the experience is that you need to add in the peanut butter after the soup is simmering, and that before you add the peanut butter you need to mix it in a separate bowl with some water to thin it out. If you put the peanut butter in too early or without thinning it you risk cooking the peanut butter into a blob.