‘Home’ is as good of a place to start as
any. I was brought up in North London, an area with a strong Indian community. As
girl of mixed heritage, with a Caribbean father and an English mother, my house
was always filled with the aromas of foreign cuisine. My earliest memories were
of my mother with a dirty apron and pencil stuffed haphazardly into her bun,
following a recipe scrawled out on the back of a beer matt of how to make
“Auntie Dadi’s fried plantains”. When they inevitably turned up on my plate as
soggy brown lumps resembling snails that had been crawling through the mud, mum
would give up and whip a shepherd’s pie together in minutes without a cookbook
in sight…This book was a staple in our home after that whenever we made
Caribbean food after that!
 |
| Blanc, Beverley Le. The Complete Caribbean Cookbook: Totally Tropical Recipes from the Paradise Islands. Edison, NJ: Chartwell, 1996. Print. |
The dish this week is “The Reggae Roast” I went to eat in my
local pub in Deal, Kent called The Lighthouse. A friend of mine, Tyrone packs
out the place with his infamous “Reggae Roast” there every Sunday.
Like the traditional English roast dinner, the
Reggae Roast is made up of meat and vegetables with gravy.
The Reggae Roast:
Jerk Chicken
Rice and Peas
Mac n’ Cheese
Coleslaw
Carrots
Green Beans
Parsnips
Reggae Chutney
Sweet Potato
Gravy
These amalgamations of foods are held
together in their likening to the traditional English Roast dinner. This speaks
volumes about how Britain’s own multiculturalism has evolved immensely over the
last 50 years. In 1948 the MS Windrush set sail from Jamaica to England
carrying just under 500 West Indians all hoping to make a life and living for
themselves in the ‘mother land’ that was England and for decades after many
more took the journey to come to a land filled with promise. After reading
books such as Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Andrea
Levy’s novel Small Island the reader learns of the disparaging
disappointment many West Indian men and women felt over their frosty welcome to
the UK. The prejudicial force of being ‘the other’ in a country struck a
debilitating chord for many West Indians. Many immigrants understood there was
a tacit feeling of having to surrender your own cultural identity in order to assimilate
into a British culture. With regards to food, in the early years of the
Windrush generation, Caribbean spices or foods were unheard of in British
menus. It relied solely on the migrants themselves to uphold traditional
dishes. There was often a compromise with cuisine by mixing what you could get
your hands on such as coleslaw and macaroni and adding these items into
traditional English dishes.
This dish has replicated exactly that and acts as
proof that even in a small seaside town in the South East of Kent, Caribbean
culture has spread and mixed in with the traditional proving that time is the
sole catalyst for widespread multiculturalism.
AND IT'S DELICIOUS!
