Walwal

Walwal, wal wal in Nuer, is the everyday grain of South Sudan and one of the defining dishes of Nilotic cooking. It begins not with a whole grain but with flour: sorghum or millet flour is sieved into a wide vessel, water is dribbled over it a little at a time, and the damp clumps are worked and broken between the hands until the flour has gathered into small, semi-uniform granules. That rolled flour is called arraw, and it belongs to a wider West and East African family of rolled-flour porridges.

What happens next decides the dish. Boiled, the arraw becomes walwal, a thick starchy porridge with the little grains still distinct in it. Steamed instead, the same arraw becomes akof, a couscous. Walwal is eaten at any meal of the day, and it is very rarely eaten dry: fresh milk, which the Nuer prize above almost anything, or a thin sour yoghurt goes over or alongside it, and a spoonful of clarified butter goes in.

The classic flavouring is lalob, the bitter fruit of the desert date, which is nutritious and adds a sharp edge against the mildness of the grain. In Bor, women running restaurants sell walwal beside the northern stews and flatbreads, mulah and kisra, and it is the plate that marks the meal as Nilotic rather than northern.