Quick-Rising Bread: Food Uncertainties in 1980s Mozambique

By Kathleen Sheldon

 In 1982 I moved to Mozambique in southern Africa to pursue dissertation research on urban working women. I was a doctoral candidate in African history at the University of California in Los Angeles. I went there with my husband, a pediatrician, who had a two-year contract with the Ministry of Health, and our toddler-aged daughter. We were somewhat prepared for living in a newly independent socialist country that ranked as one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique had gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, after a decade-long liberation struggle. But neighboring South Africa, then under the white-supremacist apartheid regime, funded and supplied weapons to organizations that were anti-socialist or otherwise opposed to Mozambique’s government. By the early 1980s conditions deteriorated as that internal war expanded.[i] Beira, the port city where we lived, suffered from repeated electrical power losses due to sabotage and increasing problems in obtaining food. Devastation in the country as a whole was extreme.[ii]

A colourful book cover of the author's memoir
Fig. 1. Cover of The Mackerel Years, the memoir by the author.

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Access to food was problematic. Most of the shops posted signs in their windows warning, “There is no salt, meat, bread,” sometimes listing a dozen items that were not available. We marveled at the rows of empty shelves, as even so-called supermarkets had only half a shelf of rough gray toilet paper and nothing else. The open-air markets displayed little or no fresh items. If tomatoes or oranges arrived at a shop, boisterous lines would materialize, and the food would quickly run out. The local dollar shop, where we could use foreign currency to buy imported items, had very limited supplies, though we appreciated delicacies like Hero jam from Switzerland. Even Spam, which we had avoided at home in the U.S., proved to be a tasty treat.

When we first arrived, we noticed that a tea shop on the ground floor of our five-story apartment building was closed and dark, though tables and chairs were visible inside. As we stopped to peer through the large dirty windows, a friend told us, “This shop used to serve nice little rolls and tea, up until a few months ago.” “Oh good,” I responded optimistically, “Maybe we’ll be able to buy some bread here.” The tea shop never opened while we were there, though it did occasionally act as a bakery and sell bread rolls, with people lining up around the block to buy a bagful.

I eventually discovered a recipe for a quick-rising yeast bread in a small pamphlet that I had brought from home, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls from the Culinary Arts Institute.[iii]

A loaf cake sites on a yellow platter topped with glazed fruit.
Fig. 2. Cover of 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession.

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Casserole Bread Batter Method

1 cup milk

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1½ tablespoons shortening

1 cup warm (not hot) water

2 packages or cakes yeast, active dry or compressed

4½ cups sifted flour

Scald milk; stir in sugar, salt and shortening. Cool to lukewarm. Measure the warm water into a bowl. (Use lukewarm water for compressed yeast). Sprinkle or crumble in the yeast. Stir until softened. Blend in the lukewarm milk mixture. Add flour and stir until well blended, about 2 minutes. Cover; let rise in warm place free from drafts about 40 minutes or until doubled in bulk. Stir batter down. Beat vigorously about ½ minute. Turn into greased 1½-quart casserole. An 8x8x2-inch square pan may be used. Bake uncovered at 375o F. about 1 hour. Makes 1 loaf.

A page of text includes recipes for various breads with yeast, with an accompanying image of bread
Fig. 3. Recipe page from 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession. Original publisher no longer exists and cannot be contacted for permission.

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Since it could be baked in an eight-inch square pan, I could use our 220-volt toaster oven that we had purchased in Los Angeles before leaving, which was more reliable than the propane gas oven installed in the kitchen. I developed a routine to fit the bread-baking into the on-and-off pattern of our electric power. When the power came on, I would immediately mix up a batch of dough, which then needed less than an hour to rise before baking. I would then beat it down, put it into the pan, and get it into the oven while we still had electricity. Even if we only had three or four hours of power every other day, I could make enough bread to last us for two or three days.

The other constraint was the erratic supply of flour. Once or twice my husband’s co-workers arranged to buy fifty-kilogram sacks and divide the flour among our group. Getting milk was also a group endeavor. We bought it in bulk through a special arrangement from a local dairy. It was delivered to our building in ten-gallon metal milk cans, shared out among our friends, and then we each boiled our share before using it.

That bread became a staple part of our diet. We usually ate it for breakfast, sliced in small squares and spread with White Rhino peanut butter that friends brought back from shopping trips to Zimbabwe or South Africa.

A white rhinoceros features in the center of black text with a red border.
Fig. 4. Label from White Rhino peanut butter, ca. 1983, in author’s possession. Image credit: Kathleen Sheldon.

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In more recent years when I met with a group of friends to discuss a draft of my memoir, one of them baked this bread for our gathering. Baking that bread during the difficult years of living with conflict had felt like a clever, necessary accomplishment, and I had not made it myself since our return to the U.S. My friend’s offering was the first time I had eaten it in forty years, and it was still a good sturdy bread that tasted wonderful with butter and peanut butter.

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[i] Two sources that focus on that conflict are: William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Books, 1994) and Hilary Andersson, Mozambique: A War Against the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

[ii] I have written about that experience in The Mackerel Years: A Memoir of War, Hunger, and Women’s History in 1980s Mozambique. This essay shares one story about how we coped.

[iii] Culinary Arts Institute, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1965). It is out of print, but available at Amazon and EBay. For more information on Culinary Arts Institute cookbooks, see Terri Griffith’s blog, 250 Potato Possibilities.


Kathleen Sheldon is an independent scholar of African women’s history. Her previous books include African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (2017), Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (2002), and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2d ed. (2016). She has also published dozens of articles in journals and edited collections and contributed as an author and editor to many reference works. She has just completed ten years on the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. She is a founding editor of H-Luso-Africa, an online network about Portuguese-speaking Africa.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jess Clark (May 7, 2025). Quick-Rising Bread: Food Uncertainties in 1980s Mozambique. The Recipes Project. Retrieved May 24, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13w3g


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