I’m back, Readers!
It’s been a long while since I’ve planted words here, but I hope that you’ve been gardening like I have. Despite the last couple of months of heavy and persistent rains here in Jamaica, the soil has been good to me. Give thanks.
So, now that I’m back, I’m quite happy to be returning with a kind of shift in perspective. While many of my past posts have been a critical looking out on Jamaica and the wider African diaspora, this post is more of a look within to find and retrieve the elusive bits that mean so much, even though (or maybe because) they are so ephemeral. This is a piece about loving those we lose, coming to terms with the elusive, and accepting that not all good times can be relived, but they can be warmly remembered. Maybe you can relate?
Well, without further delay, this is “It’s Not the Soil.”
I remember the smell and I swear I can taste it if I just focus. I can see the dish clearly. And recreating it feels so possible. But with no inherited recipe in-hand, I have struggled to reproduce this one very sentimental meal.
Today I have new confidence and a new approach to the task. I plan to raid my memory’s corners for clues that I may have missed over the years. I try a trick. Something like somatic recall. I take a long blink and wet my lips, and hope that the action might jog memory. It works.
Eyes still closed, I step into my teenage self. I swallow gently and slip into a ground floor memory. I am now scanning a recollected dining room, stuffy from Kingston’s heat, dim in the light of sunset, and now flooded with the warm scent of hot oil and the sweetness of Grace tomato ketchup. I bite air and taste notes of my grandmother’s holy trinity: fried thyme, scallion, and scotch bonnets.
To remember is to time travel and I have returned to this place where my sister and I spent many summer days and many stifling nights. It’s our paternal grandmother’s three-bedroom townhouse near Dunrobin. I am remembering the dresser lined with perfumes and powders. I am remembering the whatnot and I am remembering cups of fresh peppermint tea with condensed milk, the evening whistle of the peanut man, and the roar of the motorbike whenever Fudgy would ride into the development. It is here that I first encountered doppelgängers, though I didn’t yet know the word. And it is here and only here that I ever used red cinnamon flavored toothpaste.
The scent of Grandma Blake’s fricassee chicken and potatoes slips in again. I don’t know why this one meal haunts me, but I have never forgotten it. I remember the first time I attempted to recreate the dish myself based wholly on olfactory memory and a then fifteen year old taste in my mouth. I bought thyme, scallion, garlic and pimento from the Caribbean market on the border of Prince George’s County and Washington D.C. I brought it all home in a white plastic bag and, with heaps of hope, I prepared and seasoned eight no-hormone-added-organic-free-range chicken parts and put the meat to marinate in the refrigerator overnight. The next afternoon, I heated the oil, dropped the chicken and knew immediately that I had failed. Every bite of the blundered meal hurt.
Some years later, after my return to Jamaica, I told myself that I should try again. I convinced myself that if I had ingredients grown from Jamaican soil, then maybe I would be able to duplicate the food that I could still taste in my memory. I remember the trip to the Liguanea supermarket. I remember the nervousness that filled me as I located the very best dressed chicken in the refrigerated bin. I bypassed the imports in favor of the local Irish, grabbed a married bunch of thyme and scallion, plucked a bottle of Grace tomato ketchup from the condiment aisle’s shelf, and let intuition guide me past Morton’s towards a plastic pouch stickered with a handwritten label identifying the contents as “poultry seasoning.” I remember shrugging before unloading my basket onto the conveyor belt.
As the items glided away from me, my mind wandered back to those summer stays in that hot, three-bedroom apartment near Dunrobin with my sister. Seated in the living room on the worn, honey-hued settee in my memory, I hear the contestants of the $100,000 Pyramid. I shift my memory’s gaze to the right and rise, drifting towards the kitchen. There I see the heavy-heavy black cast iron skillet on the small stove. I see my grandmother in her sleeveless housecoat. She has a fork in her hand and she is turning the food as it browns. I hear the pop and see the oil splattering, defying gravity like fine upside down rain; yet my grandmother’s soft arms bear none of the evidence. I hear the steaming hiss of the unpeeled potato quarters French-frying and I realize my mouth is watering. I swallow and look around as if just stirring from a dream. I blink hard and open my eyes wide. The flat stare of the cashier is on me. “Your total is $3,830,” she mumbled. I paid the bill, gathered my thoughts and my groceries, and journeyed home to fail again.
Me with my 4-quart stainless steel All-Clad chicken fryer could never do what she did.
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These words are written in loving memory of my paternal grandmother, Agnes Blake, who left this world too soon. Asé. I continue to learn her story and will be writing much more about her and all the elusive bits.
As always, thank you for reading what I write pon di riddim.
"write pon di riddim" 