In a busy Lagos meals market, a buyer factors at an enamel bowl full of rice. “How a lot for a derica?” she asks.
Salesman Christopher Onyekwere scoops grains right into a tin can and holds it up, itemizing the costs for native and imported rice.
Heavy use has worn the textual content off the tin can that after contained 400 grammes of tomato paste. The branding on many of the tin cans used to measure rice, melon seeds and black-eyed beans at Lagos’s Idi Alba market is equally illegible.
Derica is a unit of measurement present in markets throughout Lagos, in addition to in some cities within the south, like Port Harcourt, and the east, like Enugu. However the place does the title come from? Twenty-one-year-old Onyekwere shrugs. “I do not know.”
An older dealer on the following avenue responds to the query with a smile.
“How outdated was the salesperson you spoke to? It’s essential to have requested the improper individual. Too younger to recollect how widespread De Rica tomato paste was,” says 49-year-old Henry Njoku.
The derica-size tin is on the left at a Lagos market (Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera)
Ubiquitous tin can
When Njoku moved west from Imo State to Lagos as an adolescent within the Nineteen Eighties to arrange his meals store, distributors have been already utilizing derica as a measurement.
However the De Rica model was as soon as so widespread in southern Nigeria, he says, that it was used merely to imply tomato paste, regardless of the model.
Nigerian meals author Yemisi Aribisala remembers her grandparents utilizing it when she was rising up within the Seventies and 80s. “De Rica was in every single place. At the moment, everybody thought of it the perfect tinned tomato,” she says.
Because the tin cans have been so ubiquitous, meals distributors began to make use of the empty cans to measure meals, every scoop being a “derica”. “We recycle a lot, it is sensible these tins grew to become a unit of measurement,” Aribisala provides.
There are additionally different items of measurement primarily based on well-known merchandise. Blue Band margarine tubs are used to measure a “butter”, whereas the smaller “cigarette cup” is measured by tins that after contained 50 cigarettes.
In Longthroat Memoirs, her 2017 assortment of essays on Nigerian delicacies, Aribisala laments the challenges of attempting to translate cigarette cups and dericas into the ounces and kilos of a cookbook. However she understands why the market distributors choose to make use of them: “Good scales are costly, and empty tins are free.”
A salesman on the Idi Araba market in Lagos exhibits the cups he makes use of for measuring melon seeds (Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera)
Any can will do
Though the title “derica” is used, market distributors nowadays use cans with totally different model names to measure this unit, says Njoku. At his Idi Araba stall, he factors on the tins resting on the mounds of dry items. “None of them are De Rica. We don’t discover De Rica tins at this market any extra.”
In 2017, the Nigerian federal authorities banned the import of tomato merchandise to stimulate native tomato manufacturing. Due to the excessive value of organising a tin manufacturing line, which might increase shopper costs, regionally produced paste, together with De Rica, began principally being offered in plastic packets, resulting in the disappearance of the enduring cans.
“Goment don ban am (The federal government banned it),” explains Agatha Okonkwo in Pidgin.
De Rica was as soon as the main tomato paste model, based on Okonkwo, the proprietor of AO Shops on the wholesale Mushin market, the place all types of merchandise, from Maggi cubes to dried crayfish, are offered.
“There was a time Nigerians mentioned De Rica once they meant tomato paste,” she says. She’d slightly not point out her age, however she remembers her mom cooking stew with De Rica within the Sixties. “Everyone used it. That point has handed.”
De Rica has its origins in a tomato processing manufacturing unit that started working in 1912 with 20 employees within the countryside of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna area. It’s unclear when the model first made its option to Nigeria, however Nigerian customers, like Okonkwo, hint their first reminiscences of it way back to the Sixties.
The saleswoman exhibits row after row of cardboard packing containers full of 60gm sachets containing totally different manufacturers of tomato paste. Just one carton holds De Rica. The others are principally Sonia – “the most cost effective” – and Gino – “the preferred” and related in value to De Rica. Even earlier than the federal government ban, De Rica was not the main model. “Competitors is an excessive amount of,” she explains.
“That is the one method you’ll discover De Rica tomato paste in the present day,” says Okonkwo, who has not seen the canned product for greater than 5 years.
Agatha Okonkwo has been promoting De Rica on the Mushin market in Lagos for so long as she will keep in mind (Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera)
Model loyalty
At this time, some nonetheless swear by De Rica.
Victor Moses, a 31-year-old sous chef in Abuja’s upscale Wells Carlton Resort, is legendary for his smoky jollof rice. His secret for getting ready the West African dish is letting the rice burn a bit earlier than including water. The opposite is utilizing De Rica to convey out the smoky flavour of his dish, giving it “a wealthy style like mustard will get”, he says. “And it additionally offers the rice an excellent pink color.”
Now the model’s reputation has catapulted again to Europe, as Nigerians within the diaspora search it out. “Nigerians are model aware,” explains Tim Szejnoga, an account supervisor for Dutch import firm Unidex. “They’ll stay loyal to 1 model their total lives.”
The 400gm tin cans could not be obtainable in Nigeria, however they dwell on in Lagos’s markets each time a vendor measures out a derica.
This text is a part of “Strange objects, extraordinary tales”, a collection concerning the shocking tales behind well-known objects.
Learn extra from the collection:
How the inventor of the bouncy citadel saved lives
How a preferred Peruvian smooth drink went ‘toe-to-toe’ with Coca-Cola
How a drowning sufferer grew to become a lifesaving icon
How a father’s love and a pandemic created a family title
