Recipes For Remembering ~ Food & Culture
I can still remember the smell of my Nana’s house, even now, so many years (too many years) later. All at once it is as though those days are so far away, like looking at them through a lens and yet like yesterday. Time is a funny thing, wouldn’t you agree? Decor changes, houses too even, so that they all merge into one, held together by that one constant. Food.
The aroma of her cooking lingers on, holding those memories in place, fragments of days spent playing with cousins, the laughter of aunts, uncles and parents. Everlasting summers and winters. Bun baking in the oven. Jerk chicken. Perfectly cooked rice.
Sunday dinners were the best though. My grandparents came to Britain from Jamaica in the fifties, some of the first settlers of the Windrush generation and so Sunday dinners were not the average meat and two veg affairs we are used to and special in their own right, but instead Jamaican Sunday dinner. Rice and peas, of course, and by peas I mean red kidney beans, the dried kind that have to be soaked overnight to rid them of their toxicity. You cook them with the rice and that’s how you get the rice that satisfying reddish colour. It’s not the same with the tinned variety. Stew chicken perfectly seasoned with thyme and allspice and that deliciously mouthwatering gravy, with a richness that comes from thinly sliced garlic and onions that seem to melt into the liquid. Like liquid silk from an exotic land. This is the aroma of my childhood.
The scent would drift through the whole house making stomachs rumble and mouths water. Sometimes I would be allowed a little taste of the gravy from the pan and in those moments I felt like the luckiest girl alive, a secret shared with my Nana. Coveted. Everyone wanted a taste, but instead would be shooed out of the kitchen to wait with the rest of them. The smell and taste of Jamaica in a semi-detached in the middle of England.
And then, when the food was finally ready, the serving hatch would open — can you remember those, or perhaps I’m just showing my age — that magical portal from which the most delicious food would emerge, steaming hot and delicious.
The living room was large, serving as both living room and dining room. Us children would sit around the dining table while the parents would dine in the living room, two worlds in one space. Old Jamaican comedies would play on the TV, but mostly the sound was drowned out by talking and laughter, the musical patois my uncles and aunts would speak, so different from their English voices, once again children themselves. Sometimes an uncle would join us at the table and I remember thinking how grown up we must have been, to have an adult sit with us, but now looking back with an adult's eye and a smile on my lips, I think he must have just been scoping out any uneaten chicken. My dad will sometimes tell, more often than not when one of my nieces doesn’t eat the food on their plate, that when he was a pickney, all the children would rush to the table when called for any who dwindled would miss out on the meat altogether and would have to make do with whatever was left. But even as he tells this, there’s a laugh in his voice and a twinkle in his eye and I marvel again at the memories evoked by the simple act of eating — or not eating in the case of one particular niece.
When people think about Jamaican cuisine, their thoughts turn instantly to that iconic dish, jerk chicken or perhaps rice and peas, but my favourite was always saltfish fritters hot from the pan with crispy batter and that salty sweetness of the fish inside. Even now, as my fingers glide over keyboard keys, though I haven’t eaten fish or any type of meat for decades, just thinking makes my mouth flood and my taste buds prickle with an anticipation that no alternative can fulfil.
My dad would make the fritters on a Sunday morning to tide us over until Sunday dinner, and we’d eat them while watching The Littlest Hobo or Little House on the Prairie. I haven’t thought of those programmes in ages. Funny isn’t it, how thinking about food brings back so many memories, unlocking those hidden depths of the mind, that part where we store all that is meaningful, even when we think we have forgotten. Like the time my grandad got my sister and I drunk on sweet sherry and fed us bun (a type of sweetened bread), thinly sliced but thickly buttered with real butter no less, to help soak up the alcohol. We’d drank it faster than he thought we would, the novelty of alcohol to children. I remember again realising that to my grandparents, my dad was still their pickney and despite his protestations, we drank half a bottle between us! Or the making of coconut sweets with my nana in the kitchen, the smell of freshly laundered clothes drying on the radiator, the panelled walls and music on the radio. Sometimes my nana would hum along but I don’t think I ever heard her sing. Or the orchard in the back garden that stretched on and on so that I would hurry back, scared I’d wandered off the property. Apple and pear trees. Long afternoons playing in dappled golden sunlight. Those pears were the best I have ever tasted, like eating liquid sunshine. The flesh was soft, sometimes bruised if it was a windfall fruit, juice overflowing, escaping to run down my chin leaving me with grubby t-shirts and sticky fingers.
Not all memories are happy though. Some are bittersweet like burnt sugar. My grandfather's funeral. I don’t remember much of it but I remember the wake afterwards, held in the Caribbean Club, a working men’s club open to the whole community. Huge platters and trays of food. Beef patties and curried goat. My Nan's death more clearly remembered, no longer a child but a grown woman with children of my own. The tears shed intermittently, sometimes interspersed with soft laughter as the woman of the family prepared the food for the funeral. Aunts and cousins, second and third, sharing their memories not only of her but of the family generally. The house full of people but with an emptiness that pervades and still the aroma of cooking, of mellowed spice and stewing meat.
I could go on and on, reliving those most treasured moments, some I had forgotten, others recalled with a smile, perhaps a tear or two. Nostalgia’s like that, sweet like ripe pear juice, golden hued like the sun dappled orchard. Funny. Sad. Sometimes bitter. Food is much more than food. Yes it sustains us, nourishes us, feeds, building us up and making us strong but food also connects us to one another and the wider world. Food is quite simply love. But to someone like me, a mixed race British woman, it is more. It is a way of staying connected to a culture that is mine but one I can only really experience second-hand. Food connects me to my family, to my ancestors, to a land distant but important nonetheless. This is what is meant by soul food, the food we share with those we love. Memories made without even trying. The every day made magic. Spanning cultures and times.
It’s easy to get lost in the past, to reminisce, but as I write this, I also wonder about my own family, my own children and their cousins, my nieces and nephews. What memories will they take with them into the future. Will they laugh at the time one of the dogs stole a steak I’d left on the counter, too close to the edge and too tempting? Perhaps they’ll marvel that I never burnt down the house because of that one time I’d left the hob on and we were all woken by the smoke alarms. Perhaps my foraged fruit crumble will bring to mind long summer days spent blackberry picking, the children eating as many as found their way into the basket. Maybe it’ll be the rice and peas. Or the time my son fell into the river trying to catch a fish for supper. What I do know though is that through the good times and the bad, even the downright desolate, we share those times with those we love the most and who love us in return and more often than not, food is the thread that holds us together, weaving the tapestry of life, no matter who we are or where we are from. Food is the celebration and the comfort. Food is life and love.
EMMA KATHRYN
Emma Kathryn, practises traditional British witchcraft, Vodou and Obeah, a mixture representing her heritage. She lives in the sticks with her family where she reads tarot, practises witchcraft and drink copious amounts of coffee.
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