It’s a little sweetness of which Zimbabwean mothers have the secret. It comes from Great Britain, the former colonial power, but the tradition survived independence to become part of the landscape of this corner of southern Africa: the “scone”, a tender delicacy.
A soft roll, which must be dense and airy at the same time, it accompanies afternoon tea in Oxford. Served with whipped cream and strawberry jam. In Harare, it is rather a satisfying breakfast but it is eaten at any time.
Decades after the departure of the English, many forget its origin. “We love scones here. They’re not British anymore, they’re completely ours,” Nyari Mashayamombe, 42, told AFP when she met in a restaurant in Belgravia, a chic neighborhood like the one of the same name in London.
“It’s one of those beautiful traditions that becomes an intercultural exchange,” said the red-haired woman, a women’s rights activist, in the garden dotted with parasols. “Here they cost up to six dollars but it’s worth it”.
A few kilometers further on in the hectic market of Mbare, the oldest township in the capital, scones are hard to find at midday. “We sell them in the morning, they go very quickly,” remarks a young man who has a few loaves left on a trestle.
In the main bakery in the neighborhood with its dilapidated buildings, they are sold from dawn. Four for one US dollar.
At the foot of the bread oven, in a terrible din that goes up a notch when the bakers start bickering about football, a young man is sleeping on his back, one elbow against his forehead.
Every day, some 200 scones are produced in this overheated room made of rough cinder blocks, lit by two light bulbs hanging from a wire, which also offers brioches and donuts, told AFP one of its sellers, Patrick Guranungo.
Tawanda Mutyakureva arrives around 5 a.m. His post is less than two square meters, his work plan is located at the level of his knees. The 26-year-old baker in a shirt bends down to pour his dough, rolls it out and cuts out shapes with cookie cutters. He works quickly, chaining the batches.
In a damp atmosphere with the smell of sweat and sourdough, his companion, their son wrapped on his back, assists him. She butters the plates, clears them.
Resellers come to buy the scones by ten or twenty to place them in grocery stores a little further. A mother spends a head to buy bread. The scones, she makes them herself for her three children.
“Yes regularly. Not necessarily to celebrate something, just like that to please them,” says Memory Mutero, 46, with a tender smile.
The recipe is simple: flour, salt, yeast, sugar, butter and milk.
At the Bottom Drawer, a bourgeois teahouse in the capital, chef Veronica Makonese, 46, tastes a scone brought back from the township. It is formal: “it’s made with water”.
This plump-cheeked woman, wearing a white kerchief, makes her own buttermilk, leaving milk at room temperature. For acidity. And no margarine here, cheaper, but real butter. For taste and softness.
His boss, Sarah Macmillan, a 53-year-old white Zimbabwean, remembers fondly the scones of her childhood, bought from two rival shops in central Harare that have now disappeared.
“I wanted to make some here that are just as good,” she told AFP. Their success in the country, in addition to their gluttony, is easily explained: “It stalls and it’s affordable”.
03/04/2023 00:13:16 – Harare (AFP) – © 2023 AFP