Nicolas Guede cooks a cat.
© AFP/File Kambou SiaABIDJAN (AFP) - The animal will be seasoned and cooked in a spicy soup and Dabou Tcheke warns his eager onlookers that the dish has already been booked, brushing away swarms of flies anxious to share it.
Among those disappointed is Leon Sery, 36, a regular client and a fan of cat, "better than beef or chicken" in his informed opinion.
"Here in Abidjan it is hard to get hold of game. But the taste of cat reminds me of that of the brown owl we used to eat in the village," says Leon, who comes from the west of the country.
Dabou Tcheke, aged around 50, first "smokes" the cat over a wood fire, to singe the fur which he scrapes off with a knife. Then he chops the meat into pieces and plunges it into the boiling pot. The animal is cooked, like a rabbit, the taste of which it resembles, bones and all.
He cooks in front of his house here in the economic capital of the west African state of Ivory Coast, under a palm tree some 10 metres (33 feet) high shading his courtyard of beaten earth, with "no complexes".
"I do not see why I should hide," he says, and adds that he has heard of at least 10 other cooks like himself, a sign that even if most people still think of the cat as a domestic animal, it is no longer a taboo to cook it, albeit for a very small minority.
"I ate it for the first time 20 year ago with friends from Benin and Togo, " he says, with a touch of pride as his 10-year-old youngest daughter tends the fire. "Then I specialised in preparing it."
He was a carpenter by training but built a reputation in this unusual sector and gradually attracted a high-class clientele.
"My real clients come from the upper echelons: senior civil servants, politicians and above all army officers," he says.
And they do not come only for the taste of cat. Togolese and Beninese tradition lays down that "eating cat enhances man's powers, especially the head which gives long life," he says, pocketing a 2,000 CFA (four dollars, 3.8 euros) note for a new order.
"In the past, at least 10 years ago, I could get seven cats a day, but today I can only get one or two" from his suppliers who trap at night animals belonging to private households.
He denies stealing local cats himself, even though demand has grown over the years.
"The rarer it is, the more people want to eat it."
Seated at his side Simone Gbale, 36, his fifth partner, has no criticism of his culinary skills.
Better to cook cats than be out of work, she observes, since "30,000 CFA francs (45 euros, 60 dollars) profit a month is worth having in this time of crisis."
The cat is eaten in a soup or with a vegetable sauce with a degree of spicing to the client's taste, accompanied by attieke, the local cassava grain, and traditional palm wine or French red wine.
The dish has even entered local literature. Author Venance Konan has told the "true" story of a friend of his who "ate his French girlfriend's cat because she was more concerned with the animal than him."
©AFP