Cookbook Survivor: Rosamund Grant's Caribbean and African Cookery
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
This is one of my oldest cookbooks. I’m not so much contemplating giving it away as I am using the occasion to use it again, because it’s been quite a while. I used to cook from it quite a bit when I was in my twenties--I picked up while working on my dissertation in London. It was lightweight, easy to follow, and had a lot of fairly straightforward cookery I could handle in my little bedsit with its small stove. Plus I was working on African history and I was interested in learning more about African diasporic cuisines.
As I picked it out yesterday as my weekend selection, a weary thought did come to me: oh, this is going to seem like a Black History Month thing. It’s not that I don’t want to do my part, but I work on and stay interested in Black history every month of the year. It gets a little tiresome to have your ordinary workflow read as having a special communicative intention whenever it surfaces. On the other hand, Black History Month is a well-intentioned thing that has helped public institutions bring Black experience into view, up until the current moment in the US where maybe a quarter or more of the states are basically setting out to make Black History Month forbidden in public schools and publically-funded institutions. So in this moment especially I’m glad to have my ordinary intentions and interest show up underscored: when something as anodyne and benevolently civic-minded as a themed historical month becomes an offense that can get a teacher or professor fired, you know we continue to be in the worst timeline.
Anyway, back to Grant’s book. It’s a really compact, readable cookbook—there’s a bit of personal storytelling in just the right amount, there’s some straightforward explanations of ingredients that’s just enough information for anybody. It’s hard to explain exactly but there are cookbooks based on particular cuisines where the way some ingredients or dishes get framed is not instructional but fetishized—there’s something that goes beyond the matter-of-fact that is working to maintain the “exotic” character of a dish or an ingredient or a cuisine. That’s not this book. Maya Angelou wrote a forward for the book that actually makes this point—Grant is not providing a master key for a culinary traveller that keeps each African diasporic cuisine safely associated with its national repertoire, it’s all mixed together and sorted by her own experience, her tastes, her inventions, recipes that a friend taught her.
So today I’m going to do a couple of salt cod cakes as starters. I was toying with also making Zoe Adjonyoh’s “super-bougie” version of shito sauce to go with, but I’m not sure I feel like going out to get rum. Maybe. Then I’m going to make some yassa (basically chicken thighs that marinate in lemon juice and malt vinegar for a while; I might add a bit of hot pepper and garlic to the marinade when I do it this morning) and also some boiled plantains, though I don’t have the palm oil that her recipe calls for.