Book Talk: Exploring Caribbean Culinary History with Keja Valens

In this episode of The Moreish Podcast, Hema delves into the rich and complex history of Caribbean cuisine with Keja Valens, Professor of English at Salem State University and author of 'Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence.'

They discuss creolization, the myth of cannibalism, and the political and cultural significance of historical cookbooks in the Caribbean.

Keja shares insights from her academic research and other works, highlighting how colonialism shaped and transformed Caribbean food and culture. Don't miss this deep dive into the intricate tapestry of Caribbean culinary and cultural history.

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Learn more about Keja Valens

Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence - Keja Valens

Transcript

Hema: Hello, and welcome back to The Moreish Podcast. This is Hema. And today we're talking about creolization, the myth of cannibalism and historical cookbooks in the Caribbean through the lens of the book, Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence by Keja Valens. 

Keja is a professor of English at Salem State University. She teaches and writes on Caribbean literature, literatures of the Americas, queer theory and food writing. 

 In addition to the book we're talking about today, she's written Home Cooking: Diaspora and Transnational Caribbean Cookbooks, Caribbean Ecopoetics: The Categorical Imperative and Indifference in the Caribbean Environment, and Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature. When she is not teaching or writing, she gardens, cooks and eats. 

One passage stood out to me, quote. This book rests on two paradoxes. Colonialism both destroyed and created the Caribbean as we know it. Independent nationhood created the quote native cultures whose autonomy it putatively restored. So let's get into the conversation.

 Hi Keja!

Keja: are you doing today?

I'm doing well. Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Hema: I really appreciate you taking the time. When I came across your book, I thought this is a book that really speaks to the core of what we talk about in this podcast, which is how does history of the people of the Caribbean really reflect and influence current day culture? So that's what I'd love to talk about.

But before we get started, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself? Excellent.

Keja: Thank you. I'm excited for the conversation. So I, am a professor of actually English, but I work in Caribbean studies. So I started my career, looking at Caribbean literature, and particularly, Caribbean women's literature and through time sort of started reading cookbooks and getting involved, in Caribbean cookbooks and Caribbean food writing, and so that's been my research trajectory. Um, I also teach all kinds of literatures of the Americas, at a comprehensive regional university, um, in New England. So thinking a lot about, we talk about history and culture, and how written works are part of history and culture. 

Hema: We're going to talk about your most recent book, Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence. And I'd like to start there with the title. So within the beginning portions of your, of your book, you talk about culinary colonialism and recipes for national independence and the two of those being a part of the title and why.

So can you share that with us?

Keja: Yeah, so when I started this project, I thought that I was going to be looking at mostly Independence era cookbooks and the ways that women used cookbooks to articulate national culture and to create national culture. But as I was reading those cookbooks, I started to look for, you know, what were the first cookbooks published in the Caribbean? And I realized that there was a whole colonial tradition of cookbooks that actually the independence era cookbooks are responding to, um, and sometimes building from, but more often responding to. And so what I realized was that during the colonial era, um, mostly women, although there were men who wrote a few of the very first Caribbean cookbooks, were really using the genre of the cookbook as part of the colonial project, part of the way to say, European things are better.

And what we have found here in the Caribbean is insufficient and dangerous and, oh, maybe a little exotic and good for the fruits at least, right? And so there was a real way of denigrating and expropriating, Indigenous culture and then African culture and then Asian cultures as they arrived. The authors would take that information and then and so I started to sort of use some of it and also generally write about how white flour was way better than anything else anybody could eat.

And potatoes were by far the most important, and much better than cassava or yams, which is not true. But, right, but they, they would make these claims, and so I really started to realize that there's this kind of colonial, project through food writing, and so that that is what I'm calling culinary colonialism.

And then it, as national independence movements, start to build, that is where we start to see, food writing more often by, non white, by, by, non white people. sort of native, and there's a question of sort of who's native to the Caribbean, right? But, by Caribbean born and non white Caribbean born authors, and they're starting to retrace the histories, of those foods that had been written about, by the colonial authors and starting to say, hey, wait a second, right?

Yams are actually far more nutritious than white flour, right? Um, and so we're gonna, we're gonna reclaim that, and we're gonna reclaim how the yam knowledge got brought, and developed and we're going to, we're going to put that forward, right? Our best things are not our biscuits. Our best things are, are, you know, our various yam dishes.

Hema: And I think that speaks to, one of the other sections of the book that you talk about, which is, enduring tropes. So you talk about scarcity, cannibalism, danger, and the edibleness of the food that was Indigenous to the Caribbean or found or even sometimes in some cases brought over, as food for the enslaved people.

And I think I have a little quote from your book that I wanted to read out and we can talk about it. "European explorers could find no established civilization, no homes, no hearths. People and food had to be scarce or so barbaric that they hardly qualified as human". And I'd love to talk about that sort of enduring tropes and that quote.

Keja: Yeah. And that, and I've, I say had to, because the colonizers were operating on a principle called terra nullius. So they needed to find nothing there in order to be able to claim it and say, Oh, there's nothing here. It's ours. and so, even when they did find very vibrant cultures and towns, they couldn't see them that way, in part because of their own assumptions about what counts as culture, and in part because of their own need to find nothing. And so, showed up and they, and you know, it's in, in the letters home, Columbus's letters home, have all of these descriptions of cannibals that they found. It's highly unlikely that they actually found any cannibalism, but they found pots with bones in them and they said, Oh, there's cannibals here, right? And they, but they also were really, invested in seeing these foods as insufficient and dangerous. Yuca or cassava is one of the sort of best examples of this, it can be used. It does have poisonous substance in it and it can, it, in its, in the processing, you can make poison out of cassava.

And if you eat it, if you eat the wrong kind of cassava uncooked, it can be poisonous, and so the Europeans sort of saw this as, you know, you see even their food is poisonous. But what they didn't recognize and were unwilling to recognize generally was that, the Indigenous people knew precisely what was poisonous in yuca or cassava, or manioc, right?

And it's got these three different names, which are actually related to different, stages of processing. But Indigenous people in the Caribbean had very, sophisticated processing methods so that they could extract the poison and actually use it as a poison as a poison in, poison based fishing, and then, cook other parts of it so that it became unpoisonous process it in a whole variety of ways for all of the uses that we now, continue to draw on, for cassava. 

Hema: 

 That whole part, is really interesting because of really seeing the Indigenous people as, not people and their societies as really not worthy, and the feeling that they had to, the, the Europeans had to make something of these islands that they discovered, right? Even, you know, the name Caribs, uh, and the cannibalism that they spoke about really was perpetuated for a very long time.

And almost accepted as the truth, that the Caribs were very, violent and cannibalistic and the Arawaks were not. And it took a very long time, I think, through some of the research that I'm doing for the podcast to really uncover that there really, there is no evidence of cannibalism.

Keja: Yep. Almost all of the evidence of cannibalism is in those early explorer letters, and if you read them carefully, it's not. It's evidence of their assumption. were cannibals, but not actually evidence cannibalism. And are, know, I think one of the things that happened was that as much as the early colonizers needed to see those Indigenous people as non human, they also needed them to survive, right?

And so they were able to, you know, they extracted information from them, and then pretended as if that was, you know, it only became information when it passed to the Europeans instead of having already been information and knowledge, but we do have lots of, recipes and foods that were Indigenous to the Caribbean that have persisted, and none of them involve human flesh, right? A lot of fish, a lot of, a lot of vegetables, very little meat, although some small, some small bits of meat, but really, no human flesh.

Hema: It's really interesting that you talked about the European saying that their potatoes or their white flour were better to cook with and healthier and better to eat, which I think suggests that they brought

Keja: Yes,

Hema: foods and the ingredients that they felt were superior to the different countries of the Caribbean, which then became part of the cuisine. Is that correct?

Keja: That is exactly. And there are lots of early colonial writings and early colonial cookbooks that are re, they were really invested in wheat and in white flour, and lots of difficulty getting, white flour that was usable to the Caribbean in the early years, then, exporting it and importing it from the United States.

 As soon as it was being produced there, and all of these pieces about how you can't have a real meal if you don't have bread, and you can't have real bread if you don't have wheat flour, and ideally white flour. And so there's lots of things that are about, like, sort of, well, you know, cassava cakes are a poor imitation of real bread, and, corn based preparations are a, are a poor imitation of real bread. What is interesting, so, so there's this, so on the one hand, and a lot of Indigenous and then slaves and then indentured folks were working in the, kitchens of colonizers and then plantation owners, right? And so they were, forced to cook with white flour because that was what. the colonizers and the plantation owners and the great kitchens wanted. And so there's, that's the moment when the food, really starts to become, not only are the Europeans eating that food, but the, Indigenous, Afro Indigenous and indentured folks are also starting to prepare and eat that food. Because of course, they're not really allowed time or energy to prepare their own food.

And so they often are, you know, sort of getting some of what happens in the colonial and great house kitchens. So then white flour and white potatoes, right, start to become, part of what they're eating. And then of course, get taken over and, and, you know, exciting new creations are made with them as they get mixed together.

And that's sort of that process of, creolization, right? Of the, mixing that happens for foods and for people, in the Caribbean over the course of, the colonial period and, and then taken up and sort of reclaimed in independence.

Hema: It was, it was during that time, I guess, that, that there was such a, a mashup, right? There was the Europeans bringing their culture, their foods, their ingredients. There were the enslaved people bringing their culture and adapting it, I guess, to what was available to them in the Caribbean. Later on, the indentured servants also doing the same thing, which then created what is cuisine and culture today, which is ultimately, and this is as much a statement as a question, ultimately a culture unto itself.

Keja: Yes.

Hema: In, as an example, I often hear, and on social media, I was seeing some arguments very recently where people say, I'm Trinidadian, my family's Trinidadian, so I'll use that as an example that the Indian food cooked in Trinidad is Indian from Southeast Asia and not understanding that it's not a one to one.

It's not exactly the same, although it was influenced. And I would love to hear your thoughts on sort of that morphing into a new culture and a new cuisine.

Keja: Yeah. And that's one of the most exciting, things that happens, especially you can see it in a really active way in food. So, one of the things that happens really early on is, you know, the Europeans tried to eliminate the Indigenous people, but they didn't succeed, and so, and then they bring in African slaves, and one of the things that happened really early on was that, African slaves and Indigenous people were living together, both in, but that later became maroon encampments, but in escaped encampments, and then also just they were all forced into servitude together. And so they shared knowledge and a lot of the basic techniques, may be similar, but you can see, for example, in, So, Fufu is a, it's an African preparation and in West Africa, it's pounded. So, it's pounded, and it's various kinds of things that are pounded. It could be pounded yam, in, um, in Africa. And Africans brought that tradition with them, and then they started pounding cassava. And then they started, right, so, so now you can get, and they started pounding and doing a pounded like version of, corn.

So you get like coocoo and duckunoo, are these forms. So you've got, you've got the techniques from Africa with the ingredients from, the new world, right? And then it happens the other way around also, where, so the Africans bring yams with them, they bring bananas with them, right? And plantains with them.

And so then those foods start being grown and they start being put into, for example, um, like, um, pepper pot, right? Which is a, which is a stew, which is a, it's a, it's a, it comes from an Indigenous stew that is made using cassareep, is a byproduct of or a product of cassava, right? So, that stew, first of all, was originally a stew made with, some small meats and a lot of vegetables.

Then when the Europeans arrived, they brought, hoofed animals. They brought pigs and they brought cows, and there were not pigs or cows in the Caribbean before the Europeans arrived. So the Europeans arrived, pigs and cows. So then there start being made, pepper pot starts being made with, pork and beef. And then African slaves arrive. They know how to cook. animals. And so they're preparing, right? They're contributing to making that pepper pot, right? And then sometimes less in, in Guyana, but in some places people now put plantains into their pepper pot, right? And so, so you've got all of those ingredients coming together.

And that's why I think, often a food like, pepper pot gets held up as a national dish, right? Because it's that is right, it is the mixing together. It is literally right, that kind of stew of all of those pieces, ingredients and techniques.

Hema: You know, you talked about pepper pot as an example of being like a, a one pot dish, which is really like amalgamation of a number of different processes and techniques, but also ingredients that in some cases, and probably during the time that this dish was created, off cuts or things that the colonizers wouldn't be eating.

And I, and I think back to some of the other one pot dishes, which are similar offcuts, less meat, more vegetables, and often made in community settings and in large quantities, and my understanding is that really also stems from that time period where the enslaved people would pool together their resources in terms of food that they were allowed to create a one pot meal and also create a sense of community.

Keja: Absolutely. And that's why, you know, a lot of the recipes, especially in the earlier cookbooks, but even through the independence era, there's a lot of variation, right? You, how do you, what do you put into an ajiaco or what do you put into a pepper pot or what do you put into an oil down, right? There are so many different recipes for them, and often the recipe just says, put in provisions. And it doesn't specify what provisions, right? Because it's whatever provisions one has. And there is a kind of collaboration, and also, you know, there wasn't refrigeration. Um, so, both, I mean, prior to refrigeration at all, but then it also arrived in poorer communities much later. And so not only do you need everyone contributing, but you need something that you can keep on a low heat for days or weeks, right?

And just keep on adding. And so it changes as it goes. So even the same stew, right, you know, it's not the same stew on Tuesday as it was on, on Sunday.

Hema: You mentioned a word and I'm going to sort of hop back a little bit. You mentioned creolization and the two words creole and creolization come into play quite a bit in the book. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind just sort of, giving us a definition of both and how you're using it and what it means in the context that you're using it.

Keja: Yeah. And it's a really complex word because, of all, originally it meant one thing, up until the, through the 19th century, the word Creole really referred, it comes probably, there's, etymologies are hard to trace in this time period, but it probably comes from, of a Spanish word criar, which means to raise. And so it, originally designated folks who were from not the Caribbean, so from outside of the Caribbean, who were raised in the Caribbean, and it was to distinguish them from Indigenous people. So Indigenous people were not Creole. White folks, European folks, and African folks were Creole, and there were white Creoles, and there were African Creoles, and they were born outside of the Caribbean, and then they were raised in the Caribbean. And then, little by little, it started to change to refer to people who claimed purely non Caribbean ancestry, even though they might have actually been born in the Caribbean. And that goes all the way through the 19th century, and Creoles, and it's criollo in Spanish, and it's coyolan in French, right?

And kreyòl in, Haitian Creole. So it, you know, that same, a version of that word exists. And it's really used to designate, non Indigeneity. And then, especially in all their cultural objects. So in food, in dance, in music, in fashion, people start talking about an by the mid 19th century, people are labeling dishes Creole when they are a mixture, when they are a mixture of European, Indigenous, African, and little by little, South Asian and East Asian components come in to things that are labeled Creole.

 And those are things that are born in the Caribbean of that mixing so that by the mid 20th century or so, Creole comes to refer also in terms of people, pretty universally, to people who are of mixed, particularly mixed, European, African, and sometimes Indigenous. The question of whether, South Asian and East Asian folks get counted as Creole is an ongoing debate.

Um, and it's the same with the foods, sort of how, how at what point is that, is that included? And so creolization is the process of that mixing, right? And there's a great, Caribbean theorist, Edouard Glissant, who really, takes that word creolization and he talks about how because it is an active process, he wants to talk about it as not just something that has happened to Caribbean folks, but something that Caribbean folks are doing.

They are taking an active role in continuing and owning that mixing process. And so that's saying, yes, we are a unique and, and to be able to say we both are completely Caribbean, And we are always in a process of mixing. And so to be able to say that, like, that's, that's that creolization, not just a, not just an effect, but an act.

Hema: That sort of begs another question that you bring up and talk about in the book, which is who and what is native Caribbean, right? And I think this is very much, depending on who you talk to, an ongoing discussion, debate, whether it is ancestry, birth, , race, ethnicity and what constitutes native.

And I don't know if you've come up with a theory, an answer, if there is an answer sort of academically. This is a great question that I'd love to pose to you.

Keja: So a really good question. And I think that it's, Again, it comes up so much in the cookbooks because the pivot point for me is independence movements, the independence era, so right, so sort of, you know, starting in Haiti in 1805 and moving through the 1970s and early 1980s, in some of the formerly British Caribbean. And part of what happens is suddenly cookbooks in the independence era start saying native. recipes. And when they're claiming native recipes at that moment, they're claiming what I have been calling Creole and Creolized recipes. So around independence, native is reclaimed to refer to, non colonized, independent, Caribbean folks from all of the ancestries. So, but not folks who maintain purely European ancestries. And I think that's where it gets to be very complicated, because native technically refers to born in, right? And so there are folks with purely European ancestries, maybe, supposedly, who are born in the Caribbean and do they get to be native?

 And that independence era, kind of claiming of native really sort of says, not so much. And it draws back to the early period when the colonizers are using the word native in a very derogatory manner

Hema: Mm hmm.

Keja: To all non white people. And they, they don't use it to refer only to Indigenous people.

They start talking about the natives and there's all these colonial era cookbooks which are like, you know, the natives, you know, don't even plate their food, you know, the natives don't even use forks and knives, right? And so all of this very kind of derogatory use of that term then gets taken back up again. But you're right, it continues to be contentious.

Hema: Mm hmm.

Keja: And I, you know, I sort of, I was very careful. Even if someone has lived in, the Caribbean, if they are, you know, part of a tourist industry and born in the United States, I didn't even look at their cookbooks, as Caribbean cookbooks. Yes.

Hema: up a, a little bit of a deviation from, from your book and, and from your work. But, you know, in current day, with the plethora of food content creators using, I think the word authentic would be akin to native and, and the whole debate around who can create and share these and monetize off of these quote unquote authentic recipes.

 And that's a whole other debate, but I think it's, it just goes to show that this debate and this conversation has been going on a very long time.

Keja: Absolutely.

There's this, the way in which, some of the early colonial food writers and especially some of the ones in the early 20th century were sort of saying, Oh, I have an authentic Caribbean recipe. And. that they mean that is, this is what my cook actually makes, right?

And so a lot of those early cookbooks are actually written by women who don't do any cooking, and read by women who don't do any cooking. But they talk about like, oh, but this is the, that word starts to creep in and it means this is what my cook makes. And sometimes this is what my cook makes for her own family. Um, and that sort of refers to that, that's that sort of the mark of authenticity. But yes, it's, it's a fascinating turn, and it sort of relates back to like sort of, these claims of origin, but what is so, we have to remember in the Caribbean that claim of origin is provisional because there are so there are a few things that would trace back to a purely Indigenous Caribbean. So when we talk about Caribbean authenticity, we're talking about having been located in the Caribbean, sort of having a root in the Caribbean for a particular amount of time, but, you know, you know, um, I mean, maybe we can say that a few root vegetables are authentically Caribbean.

 A few fish, right? Some of the foods that are really hard to transport, right? Like flying fish, it's really like they have to be eaten fresh and they don't live outside of certain waters, right? So there's something that like, yeah, but you also have to be in the Caribbean to eat them.

Hema: You know, in, in the research for this podcast, as we sort of talk about the foods and the cultures and the national dishes, it is eye opening when I think about things like breadfruit being brought over as food for the enslaved people, right? It was not in any countries, Caribbean islands, ackee which is, you know, part of the Jamaican national dish from Africa, but wasn't already there.

 Saltfish, which again is used all over the Caribbean, was again, a product of the the times of slavery, right? This fish was salted to last through, the long journey across the ocean. So, so many of these ingredients were adopted, were brought over and then adopted into the cuisine using the techniques from, whether it's the African techniques, the Indian or South Asian techniques, and created this whole new culture, and this whole new cuisine, which has influences from all over the world, depending on who was on the island at the time.

Keja: That's right. And so it's really interesting when you talk about sort of think about Creole food, and in Haiti, what is called Creole food is very clear, and it's very different from what in the Dominican Republic is called Creole food. In both cases, the food is indeed a mixture of a variety of heritages, right?

But they're very different heritages. Haiti tends to be the most distinct because they were independent so early. 

Hema: Yeah.

Keja: um, but really like you can get this, you can get the same term. And that's why Creole is a hard word to say, right? Cause if you say, you know, what's, what's Creole soup? Well, in Haiti, it's one thing and in the Virgin Islands, it's a very different thing, right?

Hema: Yeah.

Keja: yeah.

Hema: Yeah. And that, and that word, you know, you've talked about it, that word creole for some people is a hard word because in some instances it has been used in a negative connotation. It has been used, as a slur. And so it's a challenging word to use, but it is, you know, very much a descriptive word based on all of what you've shared with us today.

Keja: Yeah. And again, you know, we talk about the Caribbean as a, as a, as if it were one place, right? But, but it depends also enormously on where in the Caribbean you are, on what language you speak, right. And on whether you are in the Caribbean or not in the Caribbean, right. Um, and how, how any of those words means, right.

And there are like, there are other words, the word mulâtre in a lot of the French Caribbean is still an absolutely normal descriptive word to use, right? And in a lot of the English Caribbean, and especially in the United States, the English version of that word has, has, has become, has been used so often in negative ways that it has become a very negative word.

Um, so yeah, when thinking about the Caribbean as this multilingual, and, and diasporic space.

Hema: Yeah. Um, you used, I'm going to paraphrase what you've said in the book, which is a lot of what we're talking about right now, which is the book rests on two paradoxes: colonization both destroyed and created the Caribbean as we know it today, and I think that in a nutshell explains so much of, you know, sort of the impetus behind why we started this podcast, what we wanted to talk about, because, there's so much truth in that statement, but I would love to know what you meant by that and how you contend with that throughout the writing of this book.

Keja: Yeah. Yeah. So I would say, you know, um, first of all, the destroyed part is probably more obvious and easier to claim, right? Europeans arrived and they tried to wipe out people. They didn't succeed, but they certainly tried. you know, destroyed crops. They destroyed ecosystems. They, you know, destroyed political organizations, right?

There was just massive destruction. And particularly, I think, when we think about the ecosystem change, right? It's as much as the people, as you were saying, these foods that, you know, breadfruit, sugarcane, plantain, all of these foods that are all over the Caribbean, right, were not there before the Europeans arrived.

And so it's just a massive ecosystem destruction, and human destruction. There's no going back to the, to a pre colonial Caribbean, right? Um, and, and that's that destruction. But at the same time, Caribbean as we know it would not exist without colonialism and out of all of that destruction and, and abuse of people and forced removal and coerced to migration, out of all of those things has emerged the Caribbean as we know it.

Right. And, you know, you can see this again, food is a, maybe a, a a slightly easier place to look at it than people, and so we can see the ways in which there isn't a single Caribbean dish that doesn't have some European elements to it. Um, right. I was saying, pork and beef. 

So, or that doesn't have some element that came out of, the slave trade, right? Yams, um, right, as a really huge one, but tons of different foods and, practices came from Africa and were reshaped, right? They're not exactly African, right? They were reshaped in the Caribbean in that interaction. And so it's that, it's that process, what, what Glissant calls creolization, that process of forming together, right?

Um, and the ways in which, you know, the, uh, South Asian indentured servitude and East Asian indentured servitude, right, comes together and all of those together build what is now the Caribbean. And

Hema: Yeah.

Keja: is the outcome of colonialism, right?

And and so in a way, you know, I think a lot of, one of the things that we think about In colonial and post colonial studies, there are several, there are plenty of places where colonizers arrived, they took over political structures, they took a lot of control, they did a lot of damage, but the people and the traditions, remained, you know, up to 70 percent, maybe sometimes up to 80 or 90 percent intact.

And once the colonizers left, there were massive changes, but there was a really solid ability of, pre colonial folks to be able to return, and continue to develop, right, in their own terms. In the Caribbean, that's not the case because colonization was settler colonialism and it lasted so long. And it's not just negative, though.

The people who arrived by force or by choice were so creative, and so resilient, right, that they built these amalgamated, and it's not just one mush. And I think that's the other thing that's really important to remember, right? Even if you think about, places like Jamaica, places like Trinidad, places like Guyana, where yes, there, there is Guyanese food, but they're also African Guyanese traditions and communities that are quite different from Indo Guyanese traditions and communities and food. And so they have come together, but they've also, you know, there's also a real mosaic quality within each island and across the islands. Absolutely.

Hema: That's a, that's a really great point. You know, when we talk, when you talk about sort of the, the, Indo Caribbean and the Afro Caribbean, within the same country, but also from island to island or country to country in the Caribbean, you know, you might have a dish called the same thing from island to island or country to country, but it's prepared slightly different or uses different ingredients. And as I look at sort of historically, a lot of it stems from the population that was brought over. So if it was predominantly an African population, and it continued to remain that, then you'll see more African influences. If there was more of a, a mix of maybe African and, and Indian or South Asian, then you'll see more of those influences, but sometimes we call it the same things, and from country to country, it's a little bit different.

Keja: Absolutely. Yes. And it's really, or, or it's like, there's a slightly different word. And one of the things that happened as I was cooking all these recipes, going through these cookbooks, and I was like, you know, trying to make duckunoo from one of the early recipes and I was really struggling and then later on I found a recipe for coocoo and I was making that and it worked really well and I was like, second, this duckunoo duckunoo just with a little like, you know, with some okra put in and a better explanation for how to stir it so it doesn't get lumpy, right? You, so yeah, even sometimes it's the exact same name, sometimes you realize it's a, it sounds like a different name but it's really just a variation, um, on a name. Yes, but it's, it's fascinating how we can see these and, you know, um, pumpkin soup is the example that I sort of conclude with, but this is something that is a super common dish all over the Caribbean. And it always has pumpkin, right? It's not always called the word pumpkin isn't always the word that's used for that, um, that vegetable, but there's always that vegetable in it. And then such variety, right. And you know, where there's a big, South Asian influence, it's often made with coconut milk, where there is, a big African influence it's often made with more meats, right? So really, really interesting distinctions, that happen.

Hema: In your, in your book, you talk about sort of pre independence era, that it was not, Afro, Indigenous, or non white people writing these cookbooks, right? And you sort of alluded to that today. So it sounds like a lot of the recipes, were carried down orally and shared orally, which I guess then translates to me to every family has their own way of making a pelau or their own way of making the very same dish, which, you know, I, I might make my, my curry chicken one way, and, you know, my neighbor might make it slightly different.

It's the same dish. But because it was brought down family to family maybe it's a little bit different.

Keja: Yeah. And one of the things that's really interesting is sort of this question of like, why are there Caribbean cookbooks, you know, through the mid 20th century when everyone who cooks learned how to cook. not from a cookbook, right? And so then you start to notice, like, so the cookbooks have to be doing something other than teaching people how to cook the foods that they indicate, because everyone who cooked learned not from cookbooks, right?

Hema: Mm

Keja: And so then you start to notice there are these ways in which, like, a lot of the cookbooks are, of the early, cookbooks that are written not by colonizers and not by white folks are these community cookbooks. They're often fundraising cookbooks. And part of the thing that's interesting is people purchased those cookbooks in many ways to see how their neighbor made the food.

Right? They didn't need to know how to make pelau, right? They were really curious about how Mrs. Ramsingh made pelau, right? So, so you, you know, so you go like, so you, you kind of, you get those and that's part of the community building work that the cookbook does, right? Then you own the cookbook and you put it on your shelf and you don't take it down to remember, you know, how much broth you put in. You take it down to be like, I, you know, she put in that much broth.

Hema: hmm.

Keja: Um, so, so right. So this kind of builds community, but it also builds the like, Oh, look, everyone makes this right. There are 10 recipes for this dish, and this is our community's dish. Right. And you move over and then you start to notice, Oh, right.

I went to, um, You know, I went to Dominica and they didn't have any of this. So this is our dish, not theirs, and so, so that also does that building. But I mean, you know, part of this is literacy. You know, up and through slavery, you know, no one but white women was allowed to learn to read and write, and then until independence, very few school, their education was not mandatory. Education was not provided to everyone. And so it's only, sort of independence era you even get widespread literacy. And that's, of course, when you start to get more and more women who are writing the cookbooks and doing that work of saying, we know the recipes, we want them written down for some other reason.

Hema: You know, as you say that, it really then, the enormity of how many years these recipes have been passed down family to family, neighbor to neighbor, to continue on to this day, is incredible when you think about that, right? If they were not written down, but they were just passed down and we can still trace and still see the techniques from the different parts of Africa, the techniques from maybe the different parts of India today, that is quite a feat unto itself.

Keja: It really is. And I think that's, it's an interesting piece. It's why some of the older cookbooks are really, fascinating to look at from that perspective, cause you notice they're recording the recipes that the cooks were making, and the cooks were generally enslaved or indentured, right? And, and more enslaved, people that indentured people were working in kitchens.

And so, so they're, they're trying to write down that knowledge that the slave women had, and you compare it to what is being written in cookbooks in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. It's very similar, right? So outside of the white communities that kind of took that knowledge and expropriated it and put it in their own cookbooks, the knowledge is continuing in the kitchens. And now, you know, I mean, now, especially in diaspora, more and more women in the 21st century are cooking out of cookbooks, right? They are using those cookbooks, 

Hema: It's

Keja: to actually follow the recipes. But that, though, that is one more way of really keeping the continuity.

Hema: When people say my your curry chicken, for example, is not the way my mom made it. That to me then is completely fine because of all that we've been talking about, right? My mother, my, my grandmother didn't cook from a cookbook, which is why it is so frustrating to try and learn how to cook from some of our elders because they they don't measure. They're just like, it's by eye, by feel. Um, but it's one of, one of the things that I am really excited about and interested in is documenting some of these stories, some of these recipes, to preserve them as they are, because they're we're going to lose them if we don't at this point.

Keja: Yeah. And there are, you know, I mean, part of it is there's a lot of continuity, but there are, you know, some of these recipes, the older recipes I'm looking at. Right. And I'm going, Oh, wow. Right. There's a recipe for, cow skin soup, in one of the early Jamaican recipes recipes, right? That's not very common anymore. And so, and so some of these are really, really moments in time, to be held on to.

Hema: Absolutely. You talk about, you were talking about, you know, trying to make some of the different dishes. And as I look at, I have a very, very old, Trinidadian cookbook. And as I was looking at some of the recipes there and also some of the recipes in your book. They leave so much open to interpretation.

Keja: Yes, no, and I think that's part of what you were saying is like, you know, we learn, we learn by doing. A lot of the early cookbooks, you have to have learned by doing to follow them because they'll say, for example, put in seasoning. Right? And you have to know how to make your seasoning. You have to know what goes into your seasoning. Or they'll say, you know, boil, until it's done, and if you don't have a clue about, you know, the fact that, you know, malanga can cook for this amount of time, but, you know, if your plantain is ripe, it really can't cook for very long, right? Um, you're gonna have a terrible, kind of stewy grossness.

Hema: Absolutely. I was, you know, as I was reading through your book and I was looking at some of the recipes, I thought, you know what? I would love to maybe try some of these recipes before you and I have this conversation. 

But in some cases I was looking at the recipe thinking, I know how I would make this, but I don't know how the recipe writer intended it to be made. And so the version that I would make could be vastly different than as they wrote it. And probably, you know, if this was a European colonizer writing a recipe that their enslaved cook was making, it could then be interpreted differently in the way she wrote it.

Keja: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so again, it's this, like, especially the early cookbooks, they're doing something. They're naming this set of foods as ours, right? This set of ingredients is ours, but they're not really teaching people how to cook. And again, the people who read them maybe would, you know, if Mrs. Sullivan writes the cookbook, and then say, you know, Mrs. Conner reads the cookbook, but Mrs. Conner isn't going to cook either. Mrs. Sullivan got the recipes from her, from her cook, and Mrs. Conner is going to to her cook and say, oh, well, you make this, you know, and her cook knows how to make it already and goes ahead and makes it in her own way. But also, you know, cooking some of these, some of these, you realize that the person who wrote the recipe really didn't know what they were talking about. There's a couple of recipes that say don't peel the plantain before you put it in and then never say peel the plantain before you eat it, right? I mean, that's not true. Plantain skin is technically edible, but nobody would not peel the plantain, at least, sometimes you cook it with the skin on so that it, so you can cook it for longer, but you still peel it before you eat it, right? So there are some of these things where I tried to make the recipes and I was like, I kind of know what I'm doing and this is definitely not the right way to do it.

Hema: You know, I look at some of these recipes or things that my friends make, and I think I was born and raised in Toronto, but my family moved to Canada shortly before I was born. I ate so much Trinidadian food. But there's still so many dishes that I don't know, because of the wide array of people and cooking styles and backgrounds and history that I intend to make something and I make it the wrong way.

Because, again, I have no context for it other than a completed dish, and looking at a completed dish doesn't tell you. 

 Context has so much to do with, with, with cooking and so much of it was passed down, family to family.

 What I would love to, before we wrap up today, I would love to ask you, what would you like people to know and understand about Caribbean cooking as it relates to the cookbooks. 

Keja: So, the big piece I want folks to think about is the work that women did and do in cooking and in writing cookbooks. And how, what a political, and social act that is. It's an act of, of political claiming. It's an act of cultural preservation. And so take these cookbooks, write them. If you, you know, write, write your own, get your, get your friends and family to write them down and, and read them, and love them as these acts of cultural preservation, and political activism, and got great dishes in them, right? And you get to taste history, and as you do that, right, think about each ingredient, and especially cookbooks that tell you some of those histories, right? You get to, with each taste, you get to ingest and think through, all of those hundreds of years of pain and creativity that come out in these amazing dishes.

Hema: And the other piece I would love to add to that, you know, you implied this in, and, all the different parts of the world that are, have influenced, what these dishes are today and where these cookbooks come from. Whether it is, from the enslaved Africans in Africa's very large continent, whether it's somewhere in India or maybe the Chinese indentured servants or other parts of the world that people were brought to the Caribbean.

 The Europeans, for as much destruction, they also influenced. So I think it's important to also think about the people behind that. 

Keja: Yes. Yes. And I think, right, there's all the, like, I'm just thinking of, oh, all the pieces we didn't get to talk about, right? The ways in which there's a whole, influence of Jewish cooking that came through the Spaniards into the, right, through the folks who were escaping Spain into the Caribbean.

There's all sorts of really interesting Syrian contributions because Syrian immigrants to the Caribbean often set up food shops, and then, so, so there's an enormous Syrian influence, even though there's a relatively small Syrian descended population, so it just keeps expanding. 

Hema: For me, I know the appreciation just grows as I learn more and more about who these people were, and what they brought and how these these recipes evolved and even, you know, just thinking about the women behind these cookbooks, whether it was the European or later days, the. non white women, I'll just sort of use that catch all, who crafted and created these books when, at a time when women's thoughts and women didn't have a lot of power, right? They created their own space.

Keja: right. That's right. And, and public discourse, right? They're publishing, they're putting words on paper, they're circulating words, and they really did influence, especially these independence movements, right? The, to have a national cuisine, demands having a nation, and to have a nation demands having a national cuisine, and we have them all throughout the Caribbean.

Hema: So fascinating. We could talk for so long just based on this one book alone that you wrote. So I encourage everybody, I'm going to leave a link to it in the show notes, but let's talk about some of the other works that you have, because this is not the only book that you've written.

Keja: Um, yeah, so my first book was, about desire between women in Caribbean literature, so really looking across Caribbean literature again from the 19th century through the contemporary period, and looking at all of the ways that, women's desire for one another, appears and it is expressed not and often not at all as lesbianism, but as a way of, thinking about what are, affective structures?

What are, what kinds of love and connection, do women have? And again, sort of the centrality of, women's lives and women's work, to Caribbean creative worlds, um, and to Caribbean, societies.And I, and I have, you know, written a bunch of sort of separate articles, more recently one about, Caribbean, eco poetics. So really looking at, sort of writings about, gardens, and, um, and food, and plants and sort of how is the, how are Caribbean writers, thinking about place and space and have been forever, but really articulating a very, um, aware, of statements about what it means to be Caribbean and to preserve and to grow, in Caribbean spaces.

Hema: If people want to learn a little bit more about your work, where can they connect with you?

Keja: So I teach at Salem State University in, Massachusetts and so, I can put a link to my, webpage there and it's got all my articles and books listed.

Hema: Perfect. We'll add that link in the show notes. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much. There is so much information in this one book that, I read, I highlighted, I feel like so much of this book has been highlighted because there's so much that I want to go back and dig into and research more.

So I highly recommend this. Again, a link to the book will be in the show notes if anybody is interested. Thank you so much and I hope you have a wonderful day.

Keja: You too. Enjoy.

Hema: We covered a lot in this conversation, but there is so much more in the book, including recipes that we just didn't have time to dive into. I'll leave a link to the book in the show notes, as well as a link to find out more about Keja and her other books, articles and presentations. 

I hope you enjoyed this conversation, and we'll see you next week for the final bonus episode before we take a break and gear up for season two.