The Coal Pot as a Metaphor

The coal pot is both an icon and a metaphor for survival very much at the core of Liberian life and culture. When I reflect on my life in Liberia after a few minutes my thoughts inevitably return to the feelings of the warmth generated by the cooking and sharing a meal. Those wonderful simple, yet rich meals cooked on a coal pot.

The Coal pot is a device kinda like a charcoal barbecue grill however, rather than being just for grilling meat, the coal pot is the mainstay for cooking everything in Liberia. A segment of the populations before the 1989 civil war had a one or two burner electric hot plates, and the more affluent Liberians had an electric stove (whether it worked or not), but electricity was unreliable, and in now in post war Liberia, where I’m told electricity is rare, food was mainly cooked outdoors on the coal pot.

Every home in Liberia has at least one coal pot, we had three. Like multiple burners on an electric stove, multiple coal pots insure that the rice, the soup and hot water for dishwashing can all be prepared simultaneously. Even in homes where there is an electric stove there’s always a coal pot. There are just some traditional dishes, such as palm butter, a delicious full-bodied stew made from the laboriously obtained pulp of the palm nut tree, which tastes best when allowed to thicken over a coal pot fire.

Coal pots are made by local craftsmen. The coal pot can have a square or round (bowl-like) base and the cooking surface is generally from 12-24 inches around or square. Some coal pots are of lightweight tin and others made of cast iron and have legs and stand as high as a traditional barbecue pit. Coal pots of better design have a grate to secure the cooking vessel, but grate or not, the vessel is often set directly on the hot coals to speed the cooking process.

In the city mainly charcoal is used, but wood and dry branches are often used if it’s available. The charcoal burned in coal pots is made locally in charcoal pits where wood is cut and burned in a measured way to dry it out; then it’s bagged and sold in the market. Once the charcoal is placed in the bowl of the coal pot the coals are ignited by lighting wood slithers, plastic bags or even using cooking oil as an accelerant. For the 11 years I lived in Liberia, I never saw any commercial accelerant used to light a coal pot. I doubt if any was even sold.

While here in America ‘firing up the grill’ is seen as something of an art, lighting the coal pot is a task often relegated to the children in a family, or in some instances the house boy or girl, while the real cooks prep the meal.

As I have catapulted into middle age and battled, somewhat unsuccessfully, the spreading of my girth, I’ve had to come to grips with the reality that much of my life has spun around food. I have been in denial because most of my life I’ve had a pretty robust metabolism and an extremely high activity level that allowed me to eat like a stream- of-consciousness while still maintaining a size eight pant size. But no more!

Menopause has forced me to face the verity that many women have faced decades earlier. Food has filled all the empty spaces in my life, it comforts and supports me and when I am lonely food is my friend!

I remember that my mom always prepared a hot breakfast for my sister Yvonne and me. She wasn’t very demonstrative but I understood that her rising to prepare whatever we wanted for breakfast was her way of saying, “I love you” every morning. The love and warmth that is generated in the selection, preparation, the serving and sharing of food sustains our families in the physical, and most importantly, in the spiritual sense.

The smells and intrinsic warmth emanating from her kitchen is etched upon my heart. My mother, well into her 80’s, rarely cooks except when her grandchildren request her peach cobbler or her very special cornbread dressing at family events.

And so in Liberia, I witnessed again and again how people of color appreciate each other’s humanity, how we show that we care through the preparation, and more importantly, the sharing of food. And so I had found another reference point to reconnect to my roots in Africa – the coal pot.

The coal pot is an icon that symbolizes a tradition of resilience and strength that has endured like the people of Liberia, through their joys and sorrow and through their rise and fall and will persist until the eventual redemption of Liberia.