Breakfast of champions

Mealtime at Betty's was an endurance test. 72 and unsteady on her feet due to a kneecap dislocated while collecting firewood six years ago, Betty was still a great cook of fantastic, hearty meals. She had been a cook for the US diplomatic service in Accra, in Togo, in Niger, and in Mali over the years, and had been on the point of going off to work for the embassy in Nairobi when al-Qaida blew it up back in 1998. So now she stays at home, sitting on a bench in her porch and cooking meals for the rare tourists who drift through. Her sitting room is the closest thing that the village of Amedzofe has to a restaurant, and we ate there every day.

Working for the Americans had clearly left its mark on Betty's cooking. Our breakfast banana pancakes were wonderful but each one was the size of a dinner plate, and they came in a stack of four piled two inches high. At first we weren't too worried about this: we would miss lunch because we were on a hike, and Betty had warned us the previous night that an egg shortage (a recalcitrant chicken?) would probably mean that Kate's French toast was off. So we set to dividing this hearty breakfast between us.

We had each taken a pancake and were coping fairly well when Betty tottered in with a plate of three French toasts. We started to doubt whether we'd be cleaning our plates. I did my typical thing of refusing to take some of Kate's food; normally I do this because I'm being all falsely modest and generous, but this time I'm worried that if I eat even a morsel of her food I'll jeopardise my own attempt on the batter mountain steaming in front of me. Kate and I have ploughed our way through one pancake apiece, but we're still only half way down the stack.

I'm lamenting the fact that I've got four pancakes to get through next to Kate's three French toasts when Betty balances things out, bringing a second dose of French toasts for Kate. We're now staring at a table of food more than twice as big as anything we've been expected to tackle since we've been in Africa. If we'd been in an ordinary restaurant things might have been different, but sitting here in Betty's home we somehow felt we ought to make at least a decent stab at finishing, and not quit too early. So we drove on.

It got harder. Each morsel of pancake I forced into my mouth was like a step through a butter-and-syrup mire. I felt I was failing at each forkful. Somehow I made it through half of my second pancake, but I lost heart staring at the pregnant hummock of the last one. I cut the remainders to bits on my plate, hoping against hope that it would somehow be more manageable in small bits than if it was one huge starch frisbee. I could feel self-pity welling up my gullet as I spiked each doughy lump and forced it down to join the mass already jostling in my stomach. I chewed as if my jaw was made of lead, but somehow by doing so it felt like I was putting off the moment when I would move from toying with my food to actually ingesting it.

It's at this point that Kate picks up the sound of frying. "Do you think she's making more?" she wonders, and I think there's a note of mockery in her voice - after all, she's had two servings of French toast. "I think she's still cooking," she says. "She's probably making breakfast for the family as well," I whimper, more out of hope than expectation. And sure enough, a few minutes later Betty sails in with two more pancakes.

I am by now at the furthest extent of my gut. I can't distend any further or I'll rupture, and to my eyes, the latest pancakes have taken on the dimensions of dustbin lids.

But it feels like I'll be offending this generous old woman if I refuse, so I flop one of the fresh pancakes onto my plate and make half-hearted efforts to cut bits out of it. I feel like I won't be hungry again in a week. Whole fields of wheat are swaying in my gullet. The sounds of frying are renewed, and we decide to make our escape while there's still time.