In the meantime having pitched the tent under a great tree where we were sheltered from the rays of the sun and in tolerable security, I fed on polenta (aseeda) and water with the camel drovers…
At length a bowl of polenta and another of dried meat was set before us. My illness deprived me of all inclination to eat; and observing the company not much inclined to invite me to join them, and yet embarrassed on how to avoid the ceremony, I relieved them by declining it and desiring them to begin. When they were satiated, and they lost no time in eating…
-Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria in the Years 1792 to 1798, William George Browne
My first taste of aseeda was not the same aseeda I would eat for the next forty days. That first day I ate with some elderly camel merchants with delicate stomachs, which required them to eat wheat flour aseeda with milk, which had a disgusting gelatinous look and taste. One of them said to me, Luwees, you will eat this for the next forty days, and I was worried because I really hated it.
Lucky for me, on the trail the drovers eat a millet flour aseeda with sauce made from vegetable oil, onions, hot red pepper, and dried okra and tomato powders. Millet is used as animal feed in America because it is highly nutritious despite its rough taste. On the desert trail, good nutrition makes all the difference between life and death.
I learned to like millet aseeda mostly because I liked to burn my lips on the red pepper. And everyone in the dry desert likes to lubricate themselves inside and out with seed oils. The meat was another story. Once we bought and slaughtered a goat but it did not go very far between 10 men shared by two campfires. Another time we slaughtered a camel that was near death from exhaustion, and if an Islamic slaughter can be performed before death, the meat is okay to eat. So we hurried up and cut its throat.
We ate fresh camel meat that day and the next, and after we tried to dry the meat without salt, by cutting it into thin strips and hanging it on a rope line during the night, hoping that the wind would do the job of the sun. It did not, and it began to spoil. We ate it anyway for a few days before we all began to gag on it. Dried meat is called sharmout, and a prostitute is called a sharmouta. I never asked what the etymological connection might be.
At the aseeda bowl when many men crowd around, you have to squat not side by side but rather front to back, with the right hand pointing inward to make the food grab. It was always fun to watch a late arriving straggler join the bowl when it had already been served; he had to squeeze himself between two others, a bit like the runt of the litter fighting his way to the hind teat.
I don’t think I ever missed a nighttime meal even when I was feeling sick, for I knew that riding on an empty stomach all the next day would make me feel much worse than however bad my upset stomach was making me feel that night. And you have to eat fast if you wanted sauce on your millet, because the boy cook always shorted us on the sauce, making it so a large cold unappetizing lump of aseeda was always left over, that even the yearlings were reluctant to eat the next morning.