I first came upon this idea of eating to remember while reading a cookbook. And yes I do read cookbooks. My mother, no fan of the culinary arts, would marvel that I would do this. I read recipes for things that I have never made, and likely never will make. While in the kitchen waiting for something entirely different to finish in the oven, I will read a recipe for something exotic or bizarre or mundane. Part of it is something like anthropological curiosity . Like everywhere else in the New World, I come from a country made up almost entirely of people who arrived on my island as a result of one diaspora or another. It’s fascinating to me to find what looks like the mother origins of a Trinidadian dish in some cookbook. But I’m digressing again.
The recipe I had been reading was a Biafran groundnut stew with chicken. An old family recipe made by a Biafran student in America to pay homage to the family he lost in the Biafra famine of the 1970’s. Biafra- a country that no longer exists. So the idea of eating to remember was born in me. There are times when I get this pang- a yearning for people and places dear to me, or far away, or which no longer exist. I remember the food that goes with that memory and I have been known to drive long distances, sometimes in snow , to find the ingredients to ease my ache.
Here is my comfort food number one: cheese paste – originally made into sandwiches but now enjoyed on crackers, or crudités if I am in the phase of considering white flour to be my nemesis, which it is:
Grandma’s Cheese Paste
A goodly handful of cheddar, grated. Trinidad cheddar preferred, if available,
but it’s usually not.
A squirt of cheap yellow mustard. No substitutes. Certainly no Grey Poupon.
A knob of soft butter.
A grating of onion.
A dash of pepper sauce.
A spoonful of mayo.
And that’s it. Immediately I am transported to the Elizabeth Street house and it is Sunday night. Granny is in the kitchen with Edna or Pearl and she is making a cauldron of hot cocoa on the stove. The house is noisy but winding down. We have likely been to Gasparee and I am sunburned and tired and I am lying on my tummy in the drawing room near Grandpa’s chair, watching television and awaiting my mug of cocoa and a cheese paste sandwich. Everyone else is eating at the table, similar fare, but different sandwich, because we ate our big meal at lunch in those days – not just on Sunday, but every day. But Grandpa and I, as per our custom, are served in our TV watching spots, usually by Grandma, gently and with a smile and maybe a kiss; but sometimes by Edna, gruffly, no smile. When I was done, I am shamed to say, I would leave my plate and mug exactly where they lay, and if grandpa’s tray had already been collected, I would climb into his lap and fall asleep there, to be carried upstairs later by one of my burly uncles to be deposited in my bed. The memories of that big old house, filled with my entire family – my grandparents, uncles, my aunt and my mother, sometimes my cousins, conjures for me what it means to feel safe. And cherished.
Likewise the following- green fig souse.
Souse is an old English preparation of pickling meat and Trinidad souse usually contains meat, usually pig trotters and jowls. Sometimes the feet of chickens. But this dish has no meat and the “figs” mentioned are unripe bananas, inexplicably called figs in Trinidad.
Green Fig Souse
One large hand of green banana.
One hot pepper.
Two cucumbers
One onion
Two limes
Salt
A large bunch or watercress
Culantro or chadon beni (cilantro will do in a pinch)
Boil the bananas until cooked but still firm. Peel and slice along with the cucumber, onion, pepper and herbs. Add lime juice, salt and a little water. And I have read a recipe that says “refrigerate for 3 to 5 hours” but seriously – who can wait that long for anything? Certainly not me.
And again- the Elizabeth Street house, or the dining room at Boca View. If it’s Boca View then I am in a swim suit, wrapped in a towel, the very last person to get out of the sea and resentfully trudge upstairs to the house for lunch. I despised being called to lunch because it would mean my mermaid day was as good as done. After lunch the grownups annoyingly would all take a nap, and being too little to go down to the jetty alone I would have to amuse myself in the house for hours until the lazy adults roused themselves and I would wait impatiently for grandpa to get ready for his afternoon swim . But lunch was always a huge affair, and was gotten through quite happily by me after I was done sulking. Unless it was Lent and I was made to eat disgusting carrite or cavali, or the marginally less repulsive shark or grouper; depending on what the uncles had caught that morning.
Before my family owned Boca View, summers and Easter vacations were spent at Bombshell Bay, a sort of resort made up of a sea of bungalows scattered over the low hills of Gasparee Island. This place has significance to my family story: it is where my parents met. My mother was on the little beach, worshiping the sun, watching me paddle in the shallows, when a tall handsome man asked her if she’d like a drink from the bar.
This was the rum punch that changed our lives.
I was five and unruly. She was twenty nine and beautiful. It was a long courtship and three years later, after he married us in a civil ceremony , we spent a honeymoon weekend at Bombshell Bay.
Yes. I said “us.”
I said “we.”
The food in the Bombshell dining room was problematic for me. The entrees were heavy on the fish. And if I managed to survive the main course there was still dessert left to navigate. I would say an actual prayer for cake. But that was rare. It would more likely be red jello and canned fruit cocktail . Lord help us. Or on a particularly unhappy day, stewed prunes sitting in a bath of evaporated milk, which I suppose was standing in for heavy cream. Cruel and unusual punishment . I would try to wriggle away at this point and ask permission to go to the back wall to watch the cacabarry fish lurking in the shallow waters of the back bay, waiting for kitchen scraps . I would have fed them my prunes if I could. I miss those days, but not enough to ever eat jello on purpose. And certainly not enough to do anything whatsoever with a prune.
There are elusive things that I think I shall never taste again though. One of them is a dish of scalloped potatoes that grandma made, or maybe the cook made. If we were a fancier bunch it may have been called pommes de terre à la dauphinoise. But we weren’t fancy. I have tried to make this over and over to no avail. It always misses the mark. Delicious, certainly. What’s not to like about cream and cheese and eggs? But it never tastes like what my soul is hungry for. Another is chocolate cake – most certainly not made by granny. We were not a family of bakers. My father, as I have chronicled elsewhere, had a rabid sweet tooth, and particularly loved chocolate. When my parents moved in to their first home together, there lived a few doors down, an English doctor and his wife. He was a sexually transmitted disease specialist- this was said in whispers, as though the very treatment of the thing were somehow shameful. When we moved in they arrived with a welcome gift of a beautiful chocolate cake. Now this made me very happy- because as a child I was not allowed dessert because my mother held out hope that if thusly deprived I would grow up tall and thin. And maybe blonde. And this made my father exceptionally happy because although already tall and fairly thin, he was similarly deprived. So that night there was glorious dessert after dinner. And as we tucked in to a sizable slice of this gorgeous cake that Mrs Bennett had brought us, we discovered in sorrow that it was not good. It was truly awful. Fairly inedible. But when Mrs Bennet popped over the next day to ask if we had enjoyed the cake, we brazenly lied and proclaimed it fabulous. Mrs Bennett, bless her heart, then continued making us beautiful but ghastly chocolate gateaux with a dreaded regularity, until we moved to Cascade. That’s not the chocolate cake I want to remember. But I am still desperately seeking a cake, probably a fictitious one, that I link to my childhood.
When I became a mother, I could wait to feed my children. I had these Earth Mother fantasies of nursing well into the toddler years and freezing batches of puréed baby food along with bags of breast milk.
When Timothy was born I bought a cookbook called “Feed Me, I’m Yours.” I read it cover to cover, several times. Lots of creative healthy recipes. Lots of tips on nutrition and introducing textures and flavors. I tackled the recipes with enthusiasm but Timothy would have none of it, preferring to nourish his baby self entire with applesauce and Cheerios and not too much else. I discovered motherhood to be exhausting and decided after a bit that organic, homemade baby food was not going to be one of my non-negotiables. What I really wanted was for them to be courageous and unfastidious eaters, while honoring strong personal preferences. Having shed long sad childhood tears over being made to eat a plate of fried liver or a bowl of reheated oatmeal, I refused to ever force the boys to eat something just because I made it. And to a great extent it’s been fairly successful. They can eat anywhere and at anyone’s table, and they don’t pick the capers out of the paella.
Sometimes I wonder what my children will remember of me in the kitchen. We have our own culinary traditions I suppose. I like cooking for holidays. Christian likes beef Wellington and leg of lamb. Everyone likes low country sea food boil that my friend Chris taught me to make when I moved to Indiana. While working in inner city Miami my co-worker Earlene taught me to make collard greens the way her mother taught her. Laura’s mother taught me to make lasagne one Barbados summer when I was seventeen . And my student teacher taught me her mother’s recipe for Cuban flan. But generally I am a hit and miss cook. My Thai peanut noodle salad was an epic fail, and the children still refer to it as the “peanut butter pasta.” And when the boys were little
I made a blueberry pie for what was then our Father’s Day tradition of a hike and a picnic. The main ingredient of the pie, along with blueberries, was yogurt, which I thought was odd but decided to give it a whirl. It looked pretty strange, and was in fact quite disgusting as we discovered at the picnic. I mean Mrs-Bennett-chocolate-cake-level disgusting ; and the children have not ever forgotten it. But because I am a Trinidadian far away from home I also make stew chicken, curry channa and dal and pelau, because sometimes I need to eat what I remember. It is one of the ways that I show them who I am. That I grew up eating Indian food at the family table. That on Saturdays we ate a dish that is a direct translation of the jollof rice brought by the survivors of the triangular trade. That forbears from Madeira, and Venezuela and Syria gave us the delicacies calvinadage, kibbe, ponche de crema and pastels. That in Trinidad everything is cooked with a ridiculous amount of pepper and seasoned with obnoxiously pungent herbs.
And the boys eat it all too, but sometimes with long suffering sighs, some eye rolling, and much less enthusiasm. But it’s important to me that they know this about me. It’s part of who I am, and by extension who they are.
Some day if they are being particularly ungrateful, and if I’m feeling particularly vengeful, I may introduce them to a stewed prune swimming in evaporated milk to see if that can improve morale.
Raising Cain 