Espinet Indian Cuisine

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The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Indian CuisineAuthor(s): Ramabai EspinetSource: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 35, No. 3/4 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 563-573Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25090562

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Ramabai

Espinet

Indian Cuisine

it A nd since that night the taste of fruit cocktail

-/iLhas always been magical to me, far-off, what

ever that means. It was far from everything around. I still

getit sometimes. I

open

a

cheap

can of the overcooked,

overprocessed, overripe fruit and the whiff of gramarye is

overwhelming."

He sighed and turned away. We werelying

on the ches

terfield in his living room, flung out for the occasion into

bed-like proportions. We were talking through the thick

late summer twilight,no lights,

no music, only near street

sounds some distance below. "A childhood of privilege,"was all he said. And I could see it through his eyes too but

it was wrong, all wrong. And how tobegin to excavate the

difference from where his head had already settled it?

It had started with idle talk about giving each other Christ

masgifts?like

new lovers, I guess, wavering between no

gifts

and a bounty. One Christmas he had got no

gifts."I can't remember why now. I was about seven and all I

remember is my mother cooking ordinary food and sitting

down in the kitchen and crying. Something must have

happened but I don't know what." He smiled, and I looked

into those crinkled brown eyes that must have refused painover and over until it had no

place there any more. Some

times I thought Ihad never known anyone so cold. Strange

too how much I loved his coldness.

Me too, I thought tomyself, but did not say it.One Christmas I had got no

gifts either. It was odd, my being at my

cousins forChristmas. (Did something happen too? I don't

know.) Being there was wonderful and exciting and after

563





Indian Cuisine

sink. There was room for four toothbrushes, one for each

child. Santa Claus? My mother was offhand about it. "He

lef yuh out? He didn't come by Uncle Samuel to give yuhno presents? Well," she chuckled dryly, "Rudolph must be

get confused with all the different directions. Anyhow youknow all about Santa Claus. Yuh eh find yuh too big for

all a dat now? Go outside and play."

Much later I found out that the other presents Santa had

brought were really cheap plastic dolls that she had sewn

clothes for, night after night, when we were asleep and hewas out. The little truck my brother got cost a dollar or

two. I was already too big for everything she could make.

And she had got nothing from Santa either. Strange, isn't

it, that what stops me from telling him about all of this

is not the fact of poverty, noruncertainty, worry or any of

those things, but the familiar home-names of everybody?

Muddie, Da-Da, Papa, Sonia. Just calling those names

would be to expose myself completely. It stayed at fruit

cocktail privilege.

He went tosleep easily, leaving me alone to sort out the

discomfort of my privilege which, now that I think of it,is a fabulous Bajan dish made of rice and ochroes, salt meat

and saltfish, all cooked-down together. Why did they name

it "privilege"? The time I had itwas

ata

party where everybody brought

a one-pot from their own country. Belize had

serre, Trinidad had pelau and Barbados had privilege.When Barbados set down the s.teaming bowl they an

nounced it as a dish fit for aking. That table was a

queen's

banquet alright. And it was all poor-people Caribbean

food.

It's possible thatmy only real privilege was that our housewas packed with old books. And that made me a reader of

everything: Dr. Chase's Almanac, Alistair Cooke, mymother's cookbooks, my father's pornography. The house

had a bookcase with some leather-look volumes, bound

copies of theReader's Digest condensed series, The Reader's

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The Massachusetts Review

Digest of course, and big fat nice books written by peoplelike Zola, Marie Corelli, Lloyd C. Douglas and Pearl S.

Buck. Then there was the real stuff packed up under the

bed in cardboard boxes?my father's school books like

Pattern Poetry and The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott, The

Rivals, all of Dickens, Thoreau, Ruskin's Sesame and

Lilies, and a few of Shakespeare's plays. All kinds of trea

sures were in those boxes. The diary of Anne Frank, for in

stance. They didn't bother to put those books on the shelves

because they were old, mashed up, smelling of cockroach

eggs and the occasional mice droppings. And in betweenthe books there was the hunger that came and went with

the low, low whine of a mangy dog. The hunger came and

stayed although there was never really a day with nothingat all on the table. Something always materialised some

how. It's like that with some levels of poverty. Want, hun

ger, always there, while you're chewing and swallowing:

fried aloo and roti, fried ochroes and roti, dasheen bush and

roti, or ochroes and rice and asuspicion of salt-fish in a

split-pea cook-up. Ochroes were our salvation.

My grandfather planted them on a narrowstrip of land at

the side of the house. They grew straight and tall?taller

than usual maybe because they were half-starved of light?

their slender stems bending with every stray wind that

filtered through "the grove," and they bore extravagantly.

My mother had quarrelled with Papa for digging up the

land at the side because she wanted to set down a rock

garden there later when things got better. But she was the

first to harvest the ochroes and do unheard-of things with

them?fried, stirred into cornmeal batter with awhisper of

saltfish and made into fritters, dusted in cornmeal and deepfried. Now that I think of it, cornmeal must have been very

cheap then.

My father, Da-Da, always left home early and returned late.

He hated poor food but Muddie would always heat some

thing up for him late at night when he returned. Althoughitwas late Iwould awaken and hear their quiet, bitter argu

566



Indian Cuisine

ing about money and words like mahjongor whe-whe or

the races. My father was a gambler.

Once Sonia wasstaying at our house for a while when her

parents were onlong-leave in England. When we filled out

the forms at school for the Government examination the

teacher asked where our fathers worked. Uncle Samuel

worked at the Ministry of Agriculture so Sonia wrote

"labourer" on her card. My father worked at abig super

market in the downtown area of San Fernando. He was

always counting and parcelling up money and one day Iwas waiting for him in the office when Mr. Jones droppedin to see him. Jonesie saw him counting out the bills with

that swift downward movement that I loved to watch (Inever learnt to do it, not even now) and exclaimed, "If ah

didn't know yuh was a gambling peong Iwoulda guess byde way yuh handling dem bills. Yuh really should be casa

man." I had heard talk about

gambling

at home. I wrote

"gambler" on my examination card. That day when we

went home we were still talking about filling out the cards

and about the comingexams. Their anger at home took

usby surprise. Sonia got a

good stiff boof. I got a cut-arse.

With the gambling job you could either win or lose. So

when Da-Da won itwasplenty treats and small-change and

swiss-rolls and choc-ices and tomato juice. When he lostthe hunger started up again. When that happened Muddie

would wake up in the morning and make three or four bitter

remarks to herself before she set to work tomanage the day.

She would snip the youngest ochroes from their bushes and

serve them lightly steamed with a dot of butter. In front of

the house a stand of dasheen had sprung out of the drain.

She cut the young leaves of these, mixed them with ochroes

and made a bhaji. A little bit of flour for roti and we ate

a whole meal.

Sometimes the flour itself was scarce. One day there wasn't

even flour. Our grandfather walked the two miles to the

Chinese shop, took a trust of some flour and walked home

567




again with the twenty-pound sack on his head. Papawas

too old to work but he had his small government pension.

Why did Mr. Chinaleong give him credit? When we lived

in Biche, in the country, Papawas

always coming home

with burlap bags full of stuff on his head. He would bargainhard at the market for produce left over at the end of the

day. When he reached home he would empty the purple

bhaiganor

gingheeor tomatoes or

string-beans with a

flourish on the floor of the long front gallery while we

rushed out and foughtover what he had brought

us. There

would always be chilibibi, nut-cakes, rice-cakes (my fa

vourite) or toolum (Sonia's favourite) mixed up in between

the bhaigan and tomatoes. Once he evenbrought home a

bag of cutlass-fish and emptied them, all slithery and sea

black, on the wooden floor. Muddie sighed resignedly, but

refused to touch them. Papa gathered them up and cleaned

and gutted them. He even roasted some with sweet potatoes

on a fire built way behind the mammy-sepote trees at the

back of the house. Sonia and I feasted that day.

The acres we had left behind in Biche were valueless and

beautiful. The wooden house sprawled at the front near the

land while behind it, stretching up a hill on one side and

down into a ravine at the back was land, lots of it, with

trees, achicken-coop,

aduck-pen,

apig-pen and stables

from long ago.The

avocadotree

hadlow

branches swooping

to the ground where we rode horse, then there was the

forest of ochro bushes where weplayed cowboy-and-Indian,

and the cigarette bushes near where we played shop.

It was different in the growing suburb of La Plata, justoutside of San Fernando, where Da-Da had built the new

concrete house. Everyone lived on small lots of land al

though some were landscaped cleverly to suggest an imag

ined spaciousness. Ours was not landscaped?YET?but

my uncles had experimented with some imported grass seed

and now ourtiny front lawn was covered with devil grass.

Everyoneon the street had a car and a

refrigerator;we had

neither?YET. We borrowed ice from the neighbours be

568



Indian Cuisine

cause there were noshops

or country parlours in La Plata.

Auntie Semoy gave us ice somedays; Mr. Collins on others.

Once while Iwaited outside Auntie Semoy's kitchen and

neat living room for the ice, she asked in her friendly way,"How your mother always picking ochro so, eh? All yuh

like ochro, eh!" She followed this up by asking Muddie who

confirmed that we were almost passionate in our taste for

ochroes.

In La Plata itwas not ok to carry a gallon of the pitch oil

we used for cooking the long distance on foot from theChinese shop to our house, while the pitch oil leaked

against your legs and the gallon tin dug into the vulnerable

area near the back of your knees. Everyone else had gas

stoves and had their gas delivered in huge cylinders. And

it was not ok for Papa to walk that same distance with a

20-lb. sack of flour on his head for all the world, as Da

Da put it cruelly when he heard, "like a old bong-coolie."

Da-Da kept himself out of reach of all of this because his

job at the supermarketas a

gamblerwas very important.

Everything Da-Da did was ok because he dressed well, spokewell and did his job very well even though he lost some

times. The day Papa brought home the sack of flour, Mud

die made individual sada rotis on her tawa and crushed

some garlic and fresh Spanish thyme into a little margarine.

She served it up with panache and we ate and ate.

I think itwas around this time that I swallowed a cookbook.

I remember it well?it was the Boston Cooking School

Book, with a faded buff cover and red lettering. At the front

was a column for planning meals, followed by two whole

chapterson method. I devoured material on how to bake,

broil, saute, shir, braise, roast, how tomake puff-pastry and

how to identify a variety of fruit and vegetables like turnips,kale and kumquats although I never saw these until many

years later. The food on my plate turned into cookbook

magic. When Muddie cooked a semi-stew of eggs, saltfish

and tomatoes with bake, the food on my plate turned into

shirred eggs, braised tomatoes and saltfish souffle. Or

569




plantains dusted with lemon juice and dessicated coconut

while one slice of ordinary blackish fried plantain stared

at me from behind neatly cut quarters of roti.

Times were hard. Muddie got ajob in a little store down

the street from Woolworth. She and Da-Da worked on the

same street but theycame and went separately. Da-Da was

ashamed of having his wife work, especiallyas a

low-paid

storeclerk, so he pretended that she wasn't working at all.

She pretended she wasn't working too soeverything in the

house was supposed to run as usual. All of the cooking fellon me

although I was twelve years old and had to go to

school like everybody else.

I got tired of cooking the same thingsover and over. And

Muddie had forgotten about a thin blue hard-covered West

Indian cookbook hidden in one of the cardboard boxes. The

first day Imade coo-coo with ochroes and cornmeal out of

the cookbook Igot a terrible boof and nobody would touch

it. They said it looked stiff and slimy and that the stewed

saltfish was too oily. Late as it was, Muddie had to quickly

make up some sada roti and butter for them. It was Da

Da who savedme. His gambling job finished late that nightand he came home hungry. He ate and ate and ate. Muddie

must have been watching him suspiciously because I heard

the hiss in her voice, "Yuh know bout coo-coo? Where yuhknow bout coo-coo?" I was still doing home-work on the

big table outside and listened attentively. I had heard a

neighbour whispering toMuddie that Da-Da had a Creole

woman and that itwasn't really the gambling job that took

up so much time. When he had finished eating, Da-Da

called me and gave me abig hug. That was my licence to

practise.

After that nothingwas too hard for me, after all I had

already swallowed a cookbook. Paimie or blue drawers,

pastelles, callaloo, and shark-fin soup mixed up with dhal

and rice and fried bodi with pigtail, dumplings and stew

beef, macaroni pie with stewed dhal and tomato chokha.

570



Indian Cuisine

Pinwheel rolls, chequered cakes, steamed cucumber slices

with cheese and lemon, stuffed eggplantau gratin. The day

Imade kitcheree for Good Friday Iwas proud, proud. I

didn't get that in any cookbook. It was Mousie from the

country who came on a visit and told me how to do it. Mud

die didn't know toomuch about real Indian food and there

were no cookbooks for that. I added shrimpsto Mousie's

recipe and served it up with tomato chokha on the side.

One day I noticed that a set of vines had started to run on

thewall behind the back steps. In Biche we had endless vinesand bush. We used to make wild cucumber chow, suck the

bright red seeds of wild carilees, eat fat-pork off the bushes,and make juice from inkberries. La Plata was boring. The

vines on the wall were almost all old bush, I thought, until

I saw somebright red color peeping through. It was the

tiny wild carilees, finding their way from Biche toLa Plata,laden with small firm fruit. Only Papa ate fried carilees

because he said they were good for high blood-pressure,cancer and rheumatism. But the only thing

we had for din

ner that day was rice and dhal so I tore down about two

dozen small carilees and curried them with black massala

and little red bird peppers. Everybody ate. Some days later

I tried my hand at kaloungie because Papa had said, "If

yuh could cook massala carilee sogood, yuh might

even

manage kaloungie." Papa could cook onlyone

thing?thin

crisp kurma that Sonia called sugar sticks. But he knew

what kaloungie looked and tasted like and explained it.

Quickly, and disgorging from the insides of my big cook

book, I worked backwards. The first time the kaloungiestuck to the pot and got black all over and very dry. But

the second time it wasperfect, stuffed on the inside, crispy

succulent and slightly burnt on the outside. After that I

knew I could cook anything.

Muddie never even tried theWest Indian cookbook because

by this time she had given up on the kitchen. I supposeitwas a strange life, me and my mother sharing the kitchen

like equals; she would make breakfast and Iwould make

571




sandwiches for everybody for lunch. She would go towork

and I would have dinner cooked before she came home.

Exactly like co-wives. But it wasn't strange; it was justour

life. It wasn't privilege though.

Privilege is the life I lead now. I can do just about anythingI like in this city because I earn enough and am my own

woman. I don't like having too much, though. It makes

me feel to run out and squander it on the nearest vagrant

or on the nearest handy act of vagrancy. I'm told that this

is a permanent feature of deprivation and that without

camouflage I can be unmasked. I could care less. Sometimes

I just like to waste. Perhaps it's just indifference because

of old fruit cocktail privilege.

Privilege is also my hobby as a designer of cuisine. Word

of mouth is how it got started but now I get all kinds of

weird and wonderful jobs. Idesign cuisine to integrate every

aspect of a person's special event so that the table looks like

your life quilt laid out as a feast for eyes and palate. Home,

childhood, history, nationality, personality, seasonal pro

duce?no stops allowed. Dependingon the circumstances

I chargea fortune or nothing at all.

The menu for the party of one of my dearest friends, a

Jamaican actress,now

famous and hitting the no-holdsbarred forties, went like this:

appetizer

Pakoras 8cTamarind DipMini Accras 8cHot Bhaudhaniya Sauce

SOUP

Cream of Tannia with Spinach Puree 8c

Chopped Coriander

ENTREES

Jerk Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Arugula 8c

Water Chestnuts

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Espinet Indian Cuisine