I went to Paris for the Rugby World Cup semi-final between France and England. It was the second time in three weeks that I’d been in France for rugby and of course, I ate some interesting French food.
But despite all the croissants, pastis and steak tartare I enjoyed, the thing that gave me the most delight was tasting some excellent rum! Lest you say I sound like one of those people who go to a foreign country and only try things they know, let me tell you I stumbled on this rum quite by accident.
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There is a lot of truth to the saying, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’ and there’s also some truth to the old Trinidadian slang, ‘what doh kill does fatten, what doh fatten does purge’.
These two statements came as comfort for me today when I checked out London Scores on the Doors, a website that allows people to search for food businesses across London to find out the hygiene rating they achieved from their last food hygiene inspection.
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I was cathing up on UKTV Food’s fascinating series The People’s Cookbook and saw Trinidadian Luna Frank-Riley’s scrumptious looking Stew Chicken and Liver being feted as a fantastic entry into the cookbook.
The People’s Cookbook is a series that highlights the recipes and food stories from people who live in the UK. The beauty of it is they don’t have to be British, they can be from any part of the world. Many of the recipes and stories featured are by people who moved to the UK and brought their traditional dishes along, some are by the children and grandchildren of immigrants who maintained their food heritage.
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Caribbean food has not taken off in the UK mainly because of bad service and the inability of too many Caribbean food outlets to come up to the standard of many other restaurants.
It’s not my opinion, it’s just what the readers of the Guardian Food Blog have been saying lately.
A few weeks ago, Wade Lyn, a Jamaican-born caterer wrote about his dismay that Caribbean food hadn’t taken off in the way that other world cuisines had done.
“It’s been 45 years since Jamaican independence and the UK Caribbean community is stronger than ever, so why is Caribbean cuisine still the poor relation in this country? We’ve adopted Thai, Indian, Mexican, Italian, Chinese and Japanese cooking (to name but a few other countries’ cuisine) and taken them to our hearts (and more importantly our stomachs).”
He’s got a point but he makes a huge mistake from the outset - why is it only Jamaican independence that’s mentioned? And what does Jamaica being independent have to do with the way that British people adopt Caribbean food? Would it not have been more sensible for him to have said, it’s been almost 60 years since the SS Windrush brought the first wave of West Indian immigrants to these shores?
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