Ackee and Saltfish
Regardless of how anglicised my dad may seem to some with a narrow understanding, his cooking was often still Jamaican. His Saturday afternoon staple when looking after us was saltfish fritters, and most meals he cooked came with a side of plantain, no matter how indifferent my brother and I were to its charms – the cultural traitors we are.
Chicken
A dish, a cooking tradition so charged with history, subtext and a seasoning of undeserving shame that I almost daren’t bring it up, is fried chicken. There is reluctance to admit that among the crowning achievements of humanity (culinary or otherwise) has been the introduction of chicken to batter, followed swiftly by a shotgun marriage in a cathedral of oil. It is denigrated as unsophisticated, in no small part due to the association with the marginalised – namely black people, especially poor black people. In the form we know it, fried chicken emerged as a staple of cooking from the Southern US states. The origins are unclear - some have connected it to spiced and fried recipes from Western Africa, areas many enslaved people and their descendants trace their ancestry to. It has been pointed out, however, that battering and deep-frying it in fat also likely bares the influence of Scottish traditions. My mother will punch the air triumphantly if this is ever proved to be true (but I’m not about to risk the level of controversy fully endorsing this theory would bring). Regardless of the provenance of that first kernel of an idea, what we recognise today undoubtedly comes from the kitchens on plantations, perfected and cooked by stolen people.
There is very little, if anything, that tastes better – it’s as if we all just needed permission to acknowledge it, and it is happening. As with so many things, white hipster culture has taken this long-shunned, complex-historied black staple, repackaged it and sold it back to the gullible masses at triple the price. These places will never replace the chicken shop, however, the ultra-bright high street focal points that serve as restaurants-come-meeting points. They become geographic signifiers – south Londoners showing an often-irrational level of Morley’s devotion. But whatever form it comes in, I love it – health consequences, social connotations be damned. It was often fried, rather than jerk, chicken that my grandmother cooked on the rare occasions our whole family managed to get together when we were young. Besides, almost every culture has their version, or something close. However, European versions are freed from the burden of stigma – the worst someone will say about you serving a chicken Kyiv is that it’s a little retro.
Many of my colleagues will read this aghast and think what I’ve said is irresponsible. I am under no illusions that fried chicken is doing anything good for my life expectancy. Like Nas said: ‘Fried chicken, fly vixen Give me heart disease, but need you in my kitchen.’
Goat
A pie isn’t just crust, gravy and saturated fat – within the pastry is held the reminiscence of football on a Saturday, conjured in the pitch-green liquor. Curry goat isn’t just an indulgence spiked with your daily recommended salt allowance, but rather the past bubbles from beneath the surface – like the time when my grandad arranged catering for my aunt’s wedding, and a goat arrived alive, kicking and intent on eating the entire garden. My grandmother’s roses, my grandfather’s nerves and the goat all never recovered. Not only being able to cope with the spice, and the rich earthy funk of the meat, but actually enjoying it was a mark of pride for my seven-year-old self – signifying a mature, adventurous spirit, but also belonging. Very few people have Proustian, transportive experiences over steamed broccoli.
Rum
In Long Road, Portland Jamaica, rural night life was provided by bars often rudimentally assembled from breezeblocks and a counter. The measures were free-poured, strong enough to catch the uninitiated by surprise. The local is the same the world over, in that there will always be some patrons who don’t know when to go home, day after day. Here they stood debating loudly and propped unsteadily against the tables in the front yard.
One particular bar was the final stop off on the way home. My parents would buy tiny bottles of rum cream (Bailey’s tropical cousin), drinking them as we walked along the dirt track that led up to the house – soundtracked by the crickets coming to life in the brush, the fading light giving way to the bobbing glow of fireflies.
Coconut drops
When kids asked, ‘You ’ave five dollar fi bag juice?’, I had no idea they wanted to know if we had enough money for the polythene sacks of radioactive-coloured frozen ice that were everywhere. They were stacked high in freezers in the small kiosk shops, places so full the owner looked wedged in behind the counter by enormous tin drums of processed cheese and bags of homemade coconut drops.