I normally do my weekly grocery shopping on Sunday mornings – the first day of the new week here in Egypt. Sunday after completing my vegetable shopping, the manager asked me to sit and have coffee with him. I wasn’t in a hurry so I did. It was just coffee right? Little did I know.
He first took a bag of fresh milk from the cooler behind me and told me with great pride that it was fresh buffalo milk. Buffalo in Egypt?? He was sure it was buffalo – he even offered to have some delivered to me because it said it was so much better than cow’s milk. (I declined)
Next he pulled out a gas cylinder that was fitted with a burner ring and lit it before he bit open the corner of the bag of milk and emptied it into an aluminum pitcher for heating. As he waited for the milk to heat he directed another younger man who works there (his nephew I believe) to get us glasses and Nescafe. When the glasses arrived he put two teaspoons of sugar and a half a teaspoon of Nescafe in each small glass. After the milk had come to a boil, he filled each glass with the hot milk – very thoughtfully topping mine with a bit of the froth.
What could I do but drink it? Never having had buffalo milk I can’t really say whether it was or wasn’t really buffalo milk, but it was very tasty. And I hope and pray that the heating killed whatever microbes lurked within.
Just as I was thinking of making an exit, breakfast arrived. Lovely sesame covered bread sticks, baladi (local flat) bread and tamaeya – a fried ball made of fava beans and spices. More orders were issued in Arabic. I watched him as he ripped a piece of bread in half, dropped in four tamaeya balls and flattened them with his thumb, added some slices of tomato and a sprinkling of home-ground spice that he grabbed out of a jar with his fingers. Then he handed the sandwich to me. I ate it in spite of the fact that he’d been handling grotty money and who knows what else before he stuck his thumbs in there. It was good too.
I finally was able to make my exit. I went home and took a vitamin. I debated taking a precautionary antibiotic but so far so good…
