The gourd and the charcoal

Mursik is not yoghurt. It is milk soured deliberately in a gourd whose inside has been scoured with charcoal from a particular tree — senetwet, most often — until the wood has given up its smoke to the vessel.

The gourd is never really washed. It carries its culture from one batch to the next, which is why a family's mursik tastes like that family's mursik and nobody else's.

Use the wrong wood and you get bitterness instead of smoke. Use no wood and you get sour milk, which is a fine thing, but it is not mursik.

Drink it cold, with ugali, on a hot afternoon. It is not an acquired taste so much as an acquired patience.