Traveling in the Republic of Mali, in West Africa, you are never far from your food source — whether it's watching Bozo village fishermen cast wide nets into the Niger River, waiting while Fulani herdsmen drive their cattle across the road, or noticing small boys carefully tending to garden plots, or pitching calabashes or buckets of water on their vegetables.

During our three-week excursion to Mali, we sampled every kind of food we came across, from tasting spiffy restaurant fare in Bamako to dipping our fingers into a communal dinner pot in a Ségou family's backyard. In general, we liked all the food we tried, and not one of us got sick from it — a big plus when you are traveling in an impoverished Third World country.

Though I had traveled in South America and the Middle East, nothing prepared me for Africa. From the moment I arrived, Mali presented a constant, vibrant intensity.

My husband, my traveling companion Beverly Spears, and I were immediately struck by the clothes in Mali. Everyone we saw dressed with an air of distinction. Brightly colored cottons are made into long skirts and tops for the beautiful young women, and into shifts for older women — and always topped off by headscarves. The men sport ankle-length robes or African-style suits printed with one-of-a-kind commemorative designs.

It was all so picturesque that I found it hard to put down the camera: the slim, black boats on the Niger river moving as gracefully as Venetian gondolas; the mud-plastered mosques and adobe villages; the giant Baobab trees; and the omnipresent gourds used as musical instruments or for washing dishes and sorting rice.

Everywhere we looked, someone was carrying something on his or her head — buckets of hand-drawn water, baskets of laundry or trays topped with carrots, slices of watermelon and mangos. For a few cents, a lovely young woman would stop, take a carrot off the pile on her head, scrape it with a sharp knife and offer you this healthy snack. The locally grown mangoes were juicy and delicious, as were the orange- and green-tinted oranges.

For a few cents more, we purchased little bags of "groundnuts" from children along the roadside. They were similar to peanuts but smaller and fresher. The roadside, we discovered, was a veritable shopping mall, where one could find everything from thin mattresses and wood furniture, to grilled goat meat, to recycled bottles filled with a clear, gold liquid that could have been either cooking oil or kerosene.

When our "bush taxi" — an eight-person van crammed with 20 people — stopped in a roadside village, we were deluged by people hawking fruit, drinks, plastic bags filled with water, sacks of millet muffins and dozens of things I couldn't identify. Women often climbed aboard the taxi with big pans of food, produce or live animals. I sat for several hours with a live chicken practically on my knee — the poor bird languished in the heat but survived the journey. When I stroked its feathers, our fellow passengers were greatly amused. "Vous aimez le poulet?" (You like the chicken?), they asked.

Sampling Mali

Malian cuisine retains the influence of the French who once occupied the region, just as the urban centers still hold dilapidated colonial buildings dating from 1893 to 1960 — about the same period of French rule.

French baguettes are found everywhere except the most remote villages; in the hotels and restaurants, salads are served with a classic French-style vinaigrette. Whenever possible, I ordered a "salade mixte" — a simple combination of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes topped with French dressing.

Restaurants in the capital city of Bamako range from the Peli-Peli, a large, outdoor cafe that specializes in local dishes like chicken yassa (spicy roast chicken with rice) to the fancy Café du Fleuve, which serves elegant continental cuisine as well as local fare. The café was opened eight years ago by a retired French hotelier and caters mostly to expatriates and the staffs of non-governmental organizations.

In smaller cities, like Djenné or Mopti, we ate in outdoor cafes like Chez Baba or Bar Le Bozo. The latter featured picnic tables under a roof overlooking the Niger River, and offered a fascinating view of the pinasses and pirogues (traditional wooden boats) traversing the waterway, carrying people and supplies to the Mopti market. Not surprisingly, the delicious plat du jour at Le Bozo was fish capitan, a moist, white-fleshed fish from the Niger, served with red rice and vegetables. Local beer, French wine and Coca Cola were also on the menu. I insisted the Cokes tasted like the ones I drank as a child, although I'm not sure that was because the drink was made with its original ingredients or whether it was just the heat and the dust that made them taste so delicious.

In Pays Dogon, the flat, arid countryside in the region south of Mopti — where we saw cliffside adobe dwellings identical to those at New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument or Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado — we stayed in rustic campements with our guide. In the pitch-black night under gleaming stars with only a lantern for light, we ate chicken cooked in onion or peanut sauce, accompanied by spaghetti or couscous. (Those extremely stringy chickens weren't just free-range; they'd clearly run a marathon before arriving on our plates.)

To reach another Dogon village on the top of the stone cliff, we hiked past an exquisite spring-fed oasis where villagers hand-watered bright green onions, planted in French-style intensive beds rather than in rows. Onions, we surmised, provided a vital source of vitamin C to a population subsisting on a limited diet. Villagers we observed ate virtually nothing but millet, ground up by rhythmically dropping long poles into wooden or calabash bowls, usually by women or young children. The millet is typically eaten with a sauce derived from the leaves of the beloved Baobob tree.

Though flocks of goats and sheep wander everywhere, we saw no cheese on any menu or in any of the markets. The only milk we found was a dried powder served at breakfast with coffee, tea or "Lipton." The difference between tea and Lipton, we discovered, is that tea is carefully brewed from thrice-boiled tea leaves while Lipton refers to tea bags. The local tea, which costs just a few cents, is frequently made by roadside or market vendors in a little carafe on an open fire and served in tiny glasses.

Real family dining

My favorite gustatory experience by far, though, was dining en famille in Segou.

Since my husband would be attending a four-day conference on earthen architecture in Bamako, I had explored online and found a music festival taking place at the same time in Segou, about four hours from the capital city. Since all hotel rooms had been reserved by the time I made my inquiry, the festival offered the option of staying with a local family for 5 euros — about $7 at the time — per day.

Imagine my surprise when my host, a young man named Mahamane, arrived on a motor scooter to transport me to his family's home. Riding along the dusty highway, we passed donkeys toting huge bundles of hay, horse-drawn wagons carrying men and women to market, bicycles and scooters with entire families aboard. When we finally arrived at the Santara home at the end of a bumpy dirt road, Mahamane's mother, Hawoye Koume, was washing the family laundry — there were eight children — in a washbasin on the ground in the backyard.

As guest of honor, I sat under the sole shade tree in the dusty yard, amid children, chickens, a donkey and a forlorn puppy. I was offered a cup of water from their well but declined in favor of bottled water. But it was the only thing I said no to.

Later that evening, when they brought out pans of chicken, rice and a delicious jambalaya-style mixture of carrots, cabbage, peppers and tomatoes, I had to make a quick choice: Would it be worse to get sick or offend my hosts? I decided to dig right in with my hand. (Only the right hand, I quickly learned, is used for eating.) I ate from the same pan as Mahamane, while Haiwe and the children sat and ate a few yards behind us.

All the food was cooked on either an open-air brazier or in a tiny concrete-block kitchen close by. The latrine was across the yard in an open-air block structure. Showers consisted of a bucket of heated water with a dipper and a piece of soap.

Despite my initial culture shock, I remained with the Santera family for three fascinating days.

Each day of my stay started with breakfast — instant coffee, dried milk and fried millet beignets. Then I'd take about a 15-minute ride behind Mahamane on the motor scooter to the Mali music festival on the banks of the Niger River. Although there were cafes set up in tents at the festival, Mahamane insisted I return with him to his family home for dinner each evening and then return to the event, which lasted until 2 or 3 a.m. It seemed I'd barely fallen asleep when the loud Islamic call to prayer sounded at 4 a.m. every morning, waking me up.

One day, as I was eating with the family, a boy walked into the yard with a bucket in his hand and was given a handful of food. Later I learned that it is an Islamic custom to feed boys studying the Koran — there were no girls in this class.

After the festival, I traveled for a week with my husband before returning to Segou, where we were invited to dine with the man of the Santera household. That night we feasted from a large pan of haricots verts (slim green beans) combined with a tasty meat (possibly beef). We scooped up the food, spicy with hot peppers, with our hands and with big chunks of French bread.

We were struck by the dish's similarity to the soul food of the American South. Many Africans who arrived in this country as slaves came from West African countries like Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Benin — and it appears that they brought their cooking style as well as some of their favorite vegetables, like okra and ground nuts, along with them.

A delicious journey

Travel in Mali wasn't always wonderful or easy. We were pestered relentlessly by vendors selling more beautiful things than we could afford. There were open sewers along dirt roads and giant garbage heaps, and many days without hot water or toilets. Yet what now stands out most from our experience in Mali are the vivid colors, the alluring music, the ear-to-ear grins of the people and the tantalizing flavors of the food.

With good food from the beginning to the end of the journey, it was hard not to heed the counsel of my host, Mahamane Santera. "Il faut manger; il faut bien manger," he urged as we dined. "You must eat, and eat a lot!"

Recipes

The recipe that follows is from A Taste of Africa: Traditional & Modern African Cooking by Dorinda Hafner. Published in 2002 by Ten Speed Press, the book is out of print but still widely available via the Internet.

These slightly sweet fritters are similar to those prepared each morning by the mother of the Segou family I stayed with. I ate them with honey as I sat in the yard under a tree. In our travels in Mali, we also frequently saw millet fritters cooked on hot, open braziers in the market, and bags of fritters were also offered for sale to bush-taxi passengers by roadside vendors. They taste best straight out of the skillet.

SWEET MILLET FRITTERS

(Makes 16 to 20 fritters)

6 tablespoons milk

6 tablespoons cold water

1 tablespoon superfine sugar*

2 to 3 teaspoons active dry yeast

2 cups millet flour**

2 cups brown rice flour**

1 tablespoon baking powder

Vegetable oil, for frying

Confectioners' sugar, for dusting

In a small pan, combine the milk and water and gently heat. Pour the mixture into a medium bowl and stir in the superfine sugar to dissolve it. Add the yeast and, keeping the mixture warm (for example, on top of a warm oven) let it stand until the yeast becomes frothy.

Sift together the millet flour, rice flour and baking powder in a large bowl. Stir in the yeast mixture, cover, and let rise for 30 to 40 minutes.

Stir the mixture gently but briefly. It should be the consistency of thick pancake batter. In a large skillet, fry spoonfuls of the mixture in batches in shallow, hot vegetable oil over low heat for 5 minutes, turning frequently to prevent burning and allow the fritters to cook through.

Drain on paper towels and sprinkle with confectioners' sugar. Serve as a snack, a light meal, or, without the sugar, with soups or as a breakfast dish.

*To make superfine sugar, whirl regular granulated sugar in a blender for a minute or so.

**Available in some natural food stores (Santa Fe's Whole Foods Market carries it) or online.

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Yassa Chicken is a dish from West Africa. It may have Senegalese origins, but it can be found on every restaurant menu in Mali. It's one of those simple dishes that varies according to the abilities of the cook. The strongly acidic marinade is probably intended to tenderize the tough little yard chickens in the region. Note that you need to start the dish the night before you plan to serve it. This recipe comes from www.congocookbook.com.

YASSA CHICKEN

5 pounds skinless chicken pieces, washed

1-1/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup white wine vinegar

1/2 cup peanut oil

3 onions, sliced

Several sprigs thyme

Hot chile peppers to taste

2 cups water

4 bay leaves

Mix lemon juice, vinegar, half the oil and the onions in a bowl. Add chicken pieces and marinate overnight.

Remove chicken and onions from marinade. Brown the chicken on both sides. Fry the onions in the remaining oil for a few minutes, then add the marinade, thyme, hot pepper, water and bay leaves. Simmer on medium heat for about 10 minutes, then return chicken to the sauce in the pan and cook until done, about another 30 to 40 minutes.

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We didn't get as far as the ancient city of Timbuktu, but I couldn't resist trying this dish; the sauce was amazingly rich, reminding me of mole. The recipe is from recipehound.com.

COUSCOUS DE TIMBUKTU: STEW WITH DATES AND COUSCOUS

3-4 pounds stewing beef or lamb, cut into 2-inch chunks

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 (28-ounce) can whole tomatoes

11/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

3 teaspoons salt, or to taste

4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1/2 tablespoon ground cardamom

1-2 tablespoons cayenne pepper or to taste

2 cups water

1 cup dates, pitted and pureed (about six whole dates) in food processor or with food mill

More ground black pepper to taste

1 tablespoon ground cumin

2 tablespoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon grated nutmeg

3 medium onions, diced

2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, for garnish

Cooked couscous, for serving

Season the meat with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large Dutch oven or deep, heavy pan over high heat and sear the meat, along with the garlic, in the hot oil. (This may require several batches.) Add the cumin, fennel seeds, cardamom, ginger and black pepper and stir-fry for a few minutes.

Place the meat and spices in a large pot; add the tomatoes and enough water to cover and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, covered, for 1 hour.

Add the onions, cinnamon and dates and simmer, uncovered, on a very low heat until the meat is tender and the sauce is reduced and thickened — a minimum of 1 hour. The longer the stew can cook, the better — 4 or 5 hours is good.

Taste, adjust seasonings, sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve with cooked couscous.