Fish and quince

As you know by now, the diet in Luanda after 75 was varied: fried fish...or fried fish...or still fried fish which was always served with rice! However, depending on what trading goods you had – money was worthless – and whether you knew the right people, sometimes you could get other stuff. People who worked in the cigarette factory, for example, could swap their cigarette packs for beer with someone who worked at the beer factory. Bottles of beer could then be swapped for a chicken, or a turkey. The supreme merchandise was whisky, the real stuff, not the one everybody made at the garden shed or the one you could buy by the litre in plastic bottles! A bottle of whisky, together with something a bit more trivial, like sugar or potatoes, would be worth a whole pig! Unfortunately, the pigs, eating the same as we did had a disgusting fish taste! It was even worse than eating fried swordfish everyday! Anyway, that didn’t last as the few pigs still around in Luanda were quickly eaten and became extinct! When I started working for Schlum, I either went home or to the beach at lunchtime, but the foreign staff who had no reason or time to go home got a takeaway from the Petrangol canteen. Lunch was always fried fish heads with tomato rice and quince jelly (???) – don’t ask! One of my friends, a French engineer, only liked the jelly so he would swap his fish heads for more quince. The mystery of the fish heads puzzled the engineers, so they decided to find out why the fish only had heads and where on earth did the rest go. They went undercover to the kitchens and discovered that the cooks ate them before serving the heads to the staff!