Issue # 123
Robert Edison Sandiford
What Love Is To Cooking
Pig Tails 'n' Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food by Austin Clarke (Random House Canada, 248 pp., paperback).
In Austin Clarke's delectable Pig Tails 'n' Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food (Random House Canada, 248 pp., paperback), reflections of food often turn to women: "'My mother does-cook sweet-sweet-sweet,' I used to tell my friends," writes Clarke in his introduction. "The older boys, with more learned references and wider experiences, talked about a different kind of 'sweetness.'" As he later offers alongside Oxtails with Mushrooms and Rice: "Making food is no different from making love. Axe any woman who know anything 'bout cooking!"
These are just two of the many tasty asides the celebrated author of The Origin of Waves and Nine Men Who Laughed serves up in this memoir. A Barbadian who emigrated to Canada almost 50 years ago at the age of 21, he finds them as natural as fresh thyme.
Pig Tails 'n' Breadfruit, though dedicated "to Clifton Arthur Luke, my brother, who knows more about cooking," is really a tribute to Clarke's 81 (or 91)-year-old mother. "Food to her, as to me, is something very special, almost supernatural."
It is possible to fault the accuracy of Clarke's memory when he says Pudding and Souse is "served cold" (the sweet-potato-stuffed belly and pickled pork are served at room temperature - hot or warm if you must - but never cold), or when he calls them "the national dish o' Barbados" (that honour belongs to flying fish and cou-cou). His sentiments, however, are as genuine as his love for his mother and food. Good sense - and taste - in the kitchen are just that, whether talking about his mother's own in the '30s or '40s, or his.
So expect no measurements here: no cups or teaspoons. It's all a sprinkle of this, a splash of that; about seasoning (salt and peper and the like) to taste, or within healthy limits. These are a people's "ways of cooking," "originated in the days of economizing and slavery - two powerful factors in any consideration of Barbadian culture and folklore."
In clear Bajan dialect, recipes like Bakes and Chicken Austentations - and the stories surrounding his enjoyment of them - are related. For the culinary (and cultural) neophyte, Clarke makes the distinction between soul food and slave food: "Slave food doesn't have a damn thing to do with the soul or with 'black is beautiful.' It has everything to do with the belly."
But Clarke shows there's more to a meal made by "Wessindians" than its preparation. There is history, politics, myth, religion, class, art, great humour, and even sport. Clarke has an informal way of writing about food that is nonetheless reverent. It has earned him a James Beard Foundation nomination for one of its prestigious culinary awards. Reading Pig Tails 'n' Breadfruit is like a long, pleasant evening spent in his kitchen and company, listening to some good calypso, firing a rum or two, talking about this and that; laughing a lot and eating just as much. Proving without a doubt that what reflection is to writing, love is to cooking: essential.
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