Riaz Phillips - West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica

My grandmother Mavis always cooked. I can still hear the sound of her flickering gas hob boiling a pan of water in her Hackney estate flat in East London. From among the supermarket shopping bags in her trolley always emerged more bags: brown paper ones, bright blue, or red and white-striped plastic bags in which plantain, Scotch bonnets, green bananas and yams were nestled. As a child I didnt give this a second thought. It wasnt Jamaican food, it wasnt Caribbean food or anything foreign, it was just food, and I dont remember any sort of culinary life before it.

If curry goat, stew or soup werent on the days menu, whatever the centrepiece of the meal, be it chicken, beef or even fish fingers, island produce, grounded in my grandmothers Jamaican-born upbringing, were always present. For me, it never really warranted any thought at the time. If I went to my friends houses on the estate, I just assumed they werent eating what I usually ate on that day: the West African stews, Turkish spreads and South Asian curries of the East London estate were similar enough in sensibility that I ate them with no problem, thinking they were most probably regional variations of what my family cooked.

It wasnt until I went to school in Highgate, North London, that I began to realize the food I had grown up with was markedly different, alien even, to that of my schoolmates. I may have let it get to me, but I found solace in one of the few other kids at the school who had Caribbean parents, and whose packed lunches also consisted of leftover curry as well as sandwiches made with hardo bread. It was our secret club and in-joke, and I was happy with that. Even then, I still didnt think our food was THAT alien.

As homely Caribbean food became more of a rarity over the years, family functions were pencil marked on the calendar and I looked forward to the food with eager anticipation on the way to whatever the event was wedding, christening or funeral. As was custom at a buffet, you had to tensely wait in turn for your table to be motioned to, or if the reception was at someones house you had to wait for the kids to be allowed their turn. Pepper-covered snapper fish, mac n cheese, curries, plantain, jerk chicken were the hallowed ground of home-cooked meals, all a firework display of flavour school dinners or fast food just couldnt compete.

As I progressed through school, college and university outside of London, then corporate life, it became harder to see my grandmother. In the latter years of her life one of her legs became nearly paralyzed with disease and yet she still journeyed, stick in hand, taking the number 30 bus from Homerton to Dalston to go to Ridley Road Market to buy her provisions. It was only after she passed away that I realized I had never actually asked her why. Why did she always go out of her way to buy this food? Why did she always eat it, and make sure we did too?

Perusing bookstores as I often do, even with no intent on buying, I noticed anything to do with Caribbean food and culture was sparse. Asking around my university friends, who ironically had started moving to places like Hackney, Peckham and Brixton, they always acknowledged the local Caribbean presence in the form of takeaways, but their engagement was pretty much limited to the yearly Notting Hill Carnival. Even before the famed Windrush Generation, a Caribbean populace had lived on these isles so why was an awareness of the food and culture so low among the public? This was yet another question that stumped me.

I started having chit-chats with some of my local Caribbean takeaway owners. Louis at Smokey Jerkey and Richard of Cummin Up, both in New Cross, and Bill of JBs Soul Food in Peckham. This two-mile patch is one of the holy grails of Afro-Caribbean food in London. Posing such questions to these people I realized I was engaged in a therapy of sorts, trying to gather answers to the questions that I had never asked my grandmother. I needed to record this history and I believed something different from the usual cookbook would be a great way to do it, while also demystifying Caribbean food and culture to those who are unfamiliar with it. This was the impetus behind my first book Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK.

What I found time and time again when researching that book was that these restaurants and takeaways werent just businesses, they were entities deeply rooted in their heritage. Food and the passing down of knowledge were so pivotal to these peoples lives, the majority of whom were born and raised in the Caribbean. These owners, like my grandparents, came or rather were invited to the UK to serve the mother country and help it rebuild after the world wars. On arrival their identity was tested time and time again, be it from their new fellow citizens, the police, and even politicians. Demonized, ostracized and criminalized, they found solace in two things: music and food. The idea of even remotely adapting the recipes from home arguably meant compromising their identity and as such it was rarely done.

Meat stews and curries, still with their bones, soups peppered with chillies, and miscellaneous beige starchy foods, much denser than potatoes, were all seemingly hard to stomach for the nation housing this new group of diaspora. There was no sustained campaign to adapt the food to make it more palatable to the general populace and this hasnt really changed. As such, unlike contrived versions of Chinese and Indian food that boomed in the 1980s and 90s in the UK, Caribbean food has largely remained a mystery.

This was a revelation to me and whats more, something to contemplate. I knew the names of certain ingredients and I had come to understand why it was so important for people to carry on cooking with these foods, but I didnt know anything about their origins. Born in East London, these foods and the stories behind them told at family functions, were the limit of my connection with Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Thinking about it, below the surface, I knew just as much, or rather as little, about the region that my family hailed from as anyone else.

Spending most of my life having to face the question, Where are you from? left me in an identity limbo. After years of being part of a family that celebrated Jamaican culture, but never actually actively encouraged any of us to explore the country in more depth, the advent of social media hooked me into the idea of going. Kingston, Georgetown, Port of Spain were places Id heard about my whole life but had no clue what lay there, save from a few holidays as a kid to beach resorts with the odd excursion up the hills. About a year and a half of conversations later while writing Belly Full and a UK winter snowstorm on the horizon, clinched it.