 Welcome to this British Library Food Season event, The People and Places of Caribbean Food, generously sponsored by KitchenAid. My name is Polly Russell and I'm the Food Seasons Curator and Founder, and I work very closely with the food writer, Angela Clotten, who is the Food Seasons Guest Director. I am so sad to say that this evening is the Seasons Penultimate event. We've got one more to come. On Friday, we have the campaigning organisation called Biteback who've made a fantastic film, followed by a panel discussion talking about childhood obesity and the problem with our high streets. So that is on Friday, so check out the Food Season web page to book a ticket for that. Just a couple of housekeeping points before we get to this evening's event. You'll find tabs on your screen for feedback. We'd love to hear from you. It really helps us to shape our events. There's also a donate button. The British Library is a charity, so if you'd like to support our work, we'd be very grateful. And also really important, there's a tab for questions. And I know that the panel this evening would love to hear from you, so do enter into questions there. So tonight's event, The People and Places of Caribbean Food, with a fantastic panel, Rosamund Grant, Riaz Philip and Joe Williams, chaired by Naomi Oppenheim. Naomi's going to introduce the panel. I'm going to introduce Naomi, who I'm delighted to know quite well because I work very closely with her at the British Library. Naomi is a doctoral student at the BL and UCL. Her research focuses on the Caribbean diaspora of publishing. And over the last six months, she's done something slightly different from her research and been working on a fantastic oral history project with the British Library and the Eccles Center. The Eccles Center is set up to encourage scholarship and learning using the British Library's America's collections. And Naomi has been collecting oral histories about Caribbean food and connecting these oral histories with British Library holdings. Those oral histories are being archived at the British Library and she's used them as the basis for a series of wonderful blogs, which you can find on the British Library's America's pages. I'm absolutely thrilled because I believe that she's going to be playing some extracts from these oral histories today for this panel discussion. So this discussion really is the result of and comes out of Naomi's wonderful work over the last six months and her passion and enthusiasm about this subject. So I cannot wait to hear more. So over to you, Naomi. Thank you, Polly, and welcome, everyone. I'm so excited to get stuck into conversation with our amazing panel for what I'm sure will be an eye-opening and mouth-watering event about Caribbean cooking in the home and beyond. Before I introduce our panelists, I'm going to give a really quick overview of the Caribbean food waste project which Polly just mentioned. So as Polly said, it's an oral history project which explores people's relationship to food, family, memory, and identity. And we call it food waste because this incorporates the coming together of the culture, traditions, and history of food. So from markets to all owners, to retired restaurateurs, I've interviewed people from a range of backgrounds. And as Polly said, these interviews are about to be deposited in the British Library Sound Archive which means they're publicly available for anyone to come and listen to. And she's right, I will be paying some clips tonight which I'm really excited to share with you. And one of the ideas is really about how do we explore connections between material that we hold at the British Library and personal memories. So how does a family recipe for Peppa Pop help us to enhance our understandings of Caribbean history more broadly, but also to kind of help us interrogate and challenge the colonial written archive. And you can follow the ongoing blog series where I connect up these stories to collection items by clicking on the link below the question box. So whilst the project is very much focused on the joy, senses, and experiences of food, it's also interested in how food has been an arena for survival and resistance. So I hope that this evening we'll be able to talk about the complexities of the cuisine itself, but also the politics that surrounds Caribbean food. There's gonna be plenty of time for questions at the end, so please don't forget to submit them whether you wanna direct them to the whole panel or a specific panelist. Without further ado, I'm gonna introduce our wonderful panel who I'm so interested to hear from and really feel honored to be able to chair. I'm thrilled to have the inspirational Rosamund Grant here today. Rosamund is a published cookery writer, food expert, former restaurant owner, and also a psychotherapist, amounts many other things. Her 1989 book, Caribbean and African Cookery, which I've got here, which is such a beautiful book, and actually had an introduction by Maya Angelou was an important milestone in bringing Caribbean food to a wider audience, and she's authored several other cookbooks since. During lockdown, Rosamund's been cooking up a much-needed storm at her local food bank, and I hope we're gonna hear more about this later. Next up is Rias Phillips joining us from Berlin. He's a writer, photographer, and publisher. His first independently published and award-winning book, Belly Fool, Caribbean Food in the UK, was inspired by his own Jamaican upbringing and has been sold across the world. Alongside doing critical work of documenting the diversity of Caribbean food, his latest project, Save the Last Dub, documents the last remaining reggae record shops. And last year, he published a digital collection called Community Comfort, which has a hundred recipes from writers and cooks of color in the UK, with proceeds going to the Majonzi COVID-19 bereavement fund. Last and certainly not least, we have Joe Williams with us from Leeds. Joe is an arts and heritage activist. He created Leeds Black History Walk in 2009 and Heritage Corner in 2014. And he wants to work to disseminate the history of the African diaspora in Yorkshire. Through community arts projects, Joe has brought many celebrated figures of the African diaspora to life and he's won numerous awards for his historical activism. Joe's a visiting fellow at the University of Leeds and also an honorary fellow at Trinity University in Leeds. Joe was one of my oral history participants in Caribbean foodways and he shared his expertise on Caribbean food history and also his personal memories of eating at home and across Leeds, which I hope we get to hear about this evening. So I'm going to kick off the event this evening by asking you all what role does food play in your life today? And Rosamund, I'm going to start with you. Oh, hi. Thank you, Naomi. Gosh, what a big question. I've actually written something down because I thought I'm just going to waffle on otherwise and take too much time. So I'm going to sort of read it to start with. So providing wholesome and healthy food is important to me and it's important to well-being and it's the essence of Caribbean home cooking and I am a natural feeder, both actually feeding people literally and therapeutically feeding people. As you mentioned, I'm a fact therapist, but I really enjoy producing food. It's my passion. And if I'm not cooking for family and friends, I'm cooking for others. And I find it hard to say no. But also I love to see the pleasure it brings to people that look on the face. My daughter-in-law, Maxine always goes, mm, ah, mm, ah, you know, when she's tasting things and that's the joy, I love that, I love that. And it stems, all of this, my relationship with food stems from my upbringing in Guyana. We bonded over food as families. Meal times are very important to my family life and in our culture. I was very sort of influenced not only by my family, but also by my community, cooking in a truly multicultural country that highly values the races that we have in Guyana. Indians, Amryndians, Africans, Europeans and Chinese, you know, that's important to me. And both my father and mother were good cooks when they had time away from teaching. But ironically, my father, who was quite an academic, told me at an early age that if I didn't study, I would end up in the kitchen cooking for my brothers and sisters. And typical teenage rebellion, you know, I decided right, I'm gonna do exactly that. So I ended up in the kitchen cooking for my brothers and sisters. I also studied quite hard and I made my father eat his words really. So, you know. That's great. Thanks, Rosamund. I'm gonna go to Joe next. Okay. Thanks, Naomi. You said in the introduction that I was an expert in the history of Caribbean food. I'm just very much interested in the connections of Caribbean food and the importance. So for myself, I grew up as the youngest in a family of 11 and I'm the only English born child of pygmy. And all of my brothers and sisters can cook amazingly. And so that's where I harnessed my interest in being a consumer of other people's cooking of West Indian food. And the memories of that, the contrast of home food and school dinners or going to my friends after school and going, hmm, why is this so different? And then hearing the stories that go alongside it, I thought, hmm, there's a big gap here and that gap represents me in a way. So it's important that these stories are told, that these links are made. Today, the food means a lot to me because I enjoy Caribbean food every week, not every day, but every week it's a part of my life and it's important for socialising as well because I share that with certain people who I see on a regular basis and those relationships mean something and they're even more enhanced through the food and we do have discussions about how are we going to make this mean something to young people who, like myself, weren't born in the Caribbean and didn't have brothers and sisters that were born in the Caribbean to vitalise the narratives behind the food, how do we keep that going? Thanks, Jo. Yeah, I think that's really interesting thinking about how food is also a form of cultural nourishment for second and third generation migrants. Yes, I'll go to you now, please. I think much of the same for me, I grew up and food, specifically Caribbean and West African food, I can remember that as much as I can remember any other food to me. There's no... the concept of Caribbean or African food didn't really exist to me up into a certain point until I went to primary school, it was just food and then I realised that I was this weird kid eating all this kind of strange, mellifood that nobody else knew about and that's when I kind of understood that we were from somewhere completely different. You know, you can only contextualise those things. I'm slightly old enough that when I was a kid that wasn't the internet, so you couldn't just go on like Google Maps and actually like see how far away a place was. I just understood that my family wasn't born in the same place that I was which was England and that I could see that this food was one of the ways that they connected to this place that they were from the other one being music and as I got a bit older obviously over the years and family starts passing away I kind of understood how important that food was in terms of connecting with that heritage and keeping it alive as they mentioned going forward I started to see the power of it and how important it was for me to kind of carry the baton and take it forward into the next generation and after university when I started picking up a bit more books and finding out that a lot of this history of the transatlantic slave trade and Caribbean heritage stuff that I wasn't taught about in school my eyes were open to this wealth of information and all these archives that were out there of people who had been documenting it and I saw there was like a small gap in the UK where I thought it hadn't been documented and to kind of bring that back to food I found that everybody eats everybody loves food and especially in a place like London people are fascinated with multicultural food and I realised that that same food was a great way to kind of shoehorn in cultural history to a wider audience Thanks Riaz I just want to say I think you know the work you've been doing has been filling a huge gap of a failure to document Caribbean food in the UK and how that relates to sort of politics and culture more broadly so during the interviews the topic of what Caribbean food means came up a lot and that of course includes questions of not only underrepresentation but misrepresentation and so the first clip I'm going to play is from Renette Prime who's a lawyer and food enthusiast and she's set up her own supper club called Eat's Beats London and in this clip she's explicitly talking about what she calls a loss of distinctiveness so if we could have clip one now please The distinctions between the Caribbean islands and their cuisines is not fully appreciated and it's a shame really that you know the most that people know or think of when they think about Caribbean food is Jamaican jerk chicken and or rice and peas or just roti from Trinidad you know and there's so much more I think in terms of competition and survival you kind of lose some of your distinct characteristics of your islands because you're trying to just win over people to your food and just be a business a food business so I would love to see more of like I said like the pluris and the pepper pots and the callelous and all those kind of recipes that I associate that people don't always know about more at the forefront and realizing oh that's actually from Trinidad that's actually from Guyana that's from Dominica that's from St. Vincent and just appreciating that they all have different accents to what they do and people are appreciating that difference as well so yeah I think that's a really powerful and important clip and Rosamund I'm going to start with you because you're from Guyana and I think you've got a lot to say about this okay so I was saying that I recognize some of the dishes she mentioned actually and I agree with the politics of it that you know we get marginalized into certain types of food you know and of course Jamaican food is fantastic and Jamaicans are a lot more than they're Guyanese or Trinidadians you know that's the history of what has happened in Britain and but then people hook on to you know sort of akin selfish or curry goat as being the main thing about Caribbean food and it just marginalizes what we do and so my view is to sort of broaden out what Caribbean food means and although I'm from Guyana and that's in South America I am of Caribbean culture more than I am of South American culture and you know that means that you know we celebrate food I mean like all Caribbean people we celebrate food we you know it's a movement of communicating with your neighbors and your friends and so on and so forth and so to pigeonhole us into one particular thing you know disturbs me and so part of my mission I suppose is to sort of broaden that view and introduce Guyanese food and Trinidadian food and Barbadian food and let people have a glimpse of the beauty and the sort of vast richness and range of what we cook and what we eat and that's really terribly important because you know somebody said to me the other day can you make me a Caribbean stew and I thought well okay let's start educating here because what is a Caribbean stew do you know what I mean so it's about exploring and making sure that it's not just about hot peppers you know to have Caribbean food you must have hot peppers no we have fresh food fresh vegetables lots of herbs and seasoning and marinating things overnight so that you know the food is rich and tasty what do you think we asked do you think the phrase Caribbean cooking which I know is what this event is called is it a helpful phrase I always found that it was helpful for kind of getting people an awareness of a kind of certain idea of the food but yeah as anyone will tell you from a different island the food is wildly different from island to island and in fact I would even question the notion of Jamaican food when you kind of go to the island itself and travel around and look at the richness I think the idea of what we've come to understand Jamaican food is does a great disservice to that kind of amazing food that you find on the island as I mentioned before you know this is so diverse and the fact that it's been boiled down to rice and peas and curry goat is a shame when you as I said when you go there and you see the amazing fruits in the veg and just the diverse nature of it all and you go up into the mountains and you stay and you see the way that they cook completely wholesome food with no meat, no fish then when you go to the coast and you see the amazing seafood dishes there and how innovative they are yeah it should be definitely challenged so I think at one point it's helpful but yeah on the other hand it does a disservice Jo do you want to come in here? Just to say that Jamaicans don't help this issue at all because they're so braggadocious on the whole you know and that's how I was raised there was only one kind of Caribbean food which was Jamaican and growing up and meeting people from other islands and tasting roti from Trinidad and food from other islands had the great fortune of her going to Dominica where oh my goodness it's like the whole island live for food live for quality tasty food and they just seem to eat like kings and queens one of my favorite dishes was crabac where there's a special mixture placed inside the crab and you crack it open and it's seasoned and oh it's just absolutely wonderful and yeah if we could promote more but that falls in line with myself as an actor wanting to create more narratives and performance based work connecting Britain to the West Indies and the Caribbean and then you can bring in a lot of the history behind the food as well you know like I grew up with cow foot and you know cows ears all these kind of dishes which was not very much appealing to a child but when you learn the history and you understand how significant it is to survival but also how the people of African heritage and others who came in as well kind of created their own flag kind of like there was a lot of oppression a lot of repression in the Caribbean and people allowed their spirit their true ancient spirit to flow through the one thing that they could do and is cooking and whichever home you go in and see anybody cooking it's done with a flare with a spirit and it's shared with a spirit as well which I think is wonderful and it doesn't belong to just one island we do ourselves an injustice by thinking that and I'm curious what about the kind of the food seen in Leeds do you think it's Jamaican dominance kind of how it is in Leeds as well there is that but we the largest population of West Indians in Leeds are actually from St Kitt's St Kitt's and Nevis and so we have the oldest outdoor carnival in Britain in Europe our outdoor carnival outdoor carnival started a year before Notting Hill came outside a building and from the very first carnival it was a great opportunity in 1968 for black people for the first time because there were no restaurants then to share their different food habits with the rest of Leeds and then it's grown and there are catering companies from all over the country coming and providing Caribbean food but it does have a kind of sameness to it and for me that's about the wider social narratives that are being entertained because you've got to kind of create something that will appeal to the public and they will go whereas if we saw more on television about the diversity of the West Indies and the connections to Britain there would be more appreciation of that diversity having gone to the Caribbean and visited different islands we need to bring that spirit here in some way in whichever way maybe just a big expo we have an else court or somewhere up north that just provides a real experience and of course many people from Britain go on holidays and they do experience these things so maybe that's something we can build on or should build on well on that note I want to quickly go back to Rosamund and Riaz and ask you if you think are there some key things that sort of unite food across the region I think for me is the the narratives behind the transient nature of the food that's why I find so interesting about the Caribbean no matter what part of the world you can find some part of that in Caribbean food and the stories behind that are fascinating when I was a kid my cousins had a Chinese babysitter and I was stunned because she had a stronger Jamaican accent then sort of like my own family that's why and then obviously as I got older and learned the history of how many people from the Asian continent ended up in the Caribbean it made complete sense to me and then when you start thinking about other foods that we enjoy there on the island it makes complete sense so I think that those stories behind the food I think that's something that links all dishes and all meals in the Caribbean yeah can I have a go? I agree with all of that it's really what's good about our cooking is it all came out for me the main stay of Caribbean cooking is the African connection and we have that in common regardless of whichever island or mainland you're from when I was writing my first cooking book I was exploring experimenting with lots of different ideas and things and one of the things that I found that linked to soul is that African connection for example in Jamaica you'd call it's cornmeal cooked with raisins or coconut milk and it's tied in a leaf that may be called Thai leaf or blue drawers because when you book the water turns blue drawers or if you went to Trinidad and we call something else another island we call it Dukunu but they all came out of what I found Kenke which is African and in Guyana we call it kanki and that thread runs through a particular dish like that so it's not about our differences it's about our sameness and similarities and that we're one people really so that's really crucial to me Thanks Rosamund that's all so interesting I'm going to move us on to the next topic and this is about a theme that came up in the interviews which is around how kind of cooking varies in and outside of the home and how migration patterns actually shift the boundaries of what and where home is so I'm going to play two clips that speak to this dynamic there's Charlie Phillips the Jamaican born Notting Hill photographer who had a restaurant in Wandsworth called Smokey Joes in the 90s and the second is from Natasha Ramnerine who's from Trinidad and she moved to London in 2017 sorry 2007 and she cooks and sells food on the weekends from her home and it's called Natty Saturday Kitchen so we can have clips two and three now Different families used to cook for people they come over from work at least once a day they can have a hot meal and you'd go in different people's houses well my family I had what you call a cook shop wasn't licensed but they come around if you're working man she used to cook for about 15 to 20 people they come around to the house and have a meal there and that's where it started out from the basement they moved and they got a little shack in Portobello Road and that used to be crowded that's the first introduction to Caribbean food as such the mine grove and others but they could get started and it was very difficult because in those days the banks would lend you money come into London like leaving a small island and come into London kind of shifting in culture if I wanted Routy back then there was only one place that you could go as a Trindadian to buy Routy that was in Clapham North outside Clapham North Station it was a place called Routy Duper and going there was just like going walking into the sunshine because they were all trinny in there and they would give you a peacong and they would show up about things that were happening in Trindad and it was such a sweet little space to just as I said go and walk in the sunshine for a little bit the first one was Charlie Phillips talking about cook shops in the 50s and 60s and I think Jo you can speak to that in a minute and then Natty talking about Routy Duper going for a walk in the sunshine which is a really wonderful clip and I wanted to start with you Riaz because of course Belly Fall I recommend everyone get a copy it's an amazing book of course it's totally focused on cooking and eating in public and commercial spaces and I just wanted to get you to sort of describe what you think the differences are between cooking and eating in public and private I think then the idea behind Belly Fall was that that distinction wasn't important as the food itself and that people turned to these places initially because of that disconnection between their own home and so they kind of found new homes in these public spaces and these places became those kind of central hubs that the local cook shop where they're from in the Caribbean might have been obviously there's that kind of when you're at home there's all the cooking behind it that goes into the cooking, the shopping going into the kitchen and seeing someone cooking and the smells but I feel like for those who are kind of taken from their home or for those who are no longer at their home that still can get that nostalgia and that same feeling from these places and I think that's why they're so important and that's why I wanted to document them yeah kind of feelings of home in these in public space Rosamund could you so you've used to own a restaurant, you obviously cook lots at home and you've written a cookbook and we'll move on to your kind of lockdown cooking in the next section but for you what are the main differences between these different types of cooking? Gosh it is very different if I'm cooking my granddaughter or grandchildren I've got a few of them at home it's a completely different thing looking at what they like, what they don't like you know and all that kind of stuff once you take it out of the home arena and you're cooking for a stranger you know it's a whole different process for me I see them in three different ways I'll sort of talk about that very briefly so if I was going to come and cook for somebody I didn't know I'd first consult with that person ask them about their favourite ingredients the food you know the food that creates memories for them you know I would design their unique menu first of all on a laptop literally down to the last detail to capture some of the things that they're talking about and make sure it's accurate to make it a memorable occasion I would design something for that person, for a wedding and so on and so forth but when you come to more public cooking let's say it's not in someone's house you know I've cooked for example on the slopes of Alexandra Palace in the 90s with the African music village or a jazz occasion a jazz festival and that is cooking in a tent you know mass producing curries and all that kind of stuff is very exciting and you know it was just a different kind of thing to do and then I have stuff like cooking in a restaurant which again you're cooking for the public but you know we're using home ideas and turning them into something that looks nice on a plate but maintaining the essence of what Caribbean cooking is about which is fresh everything and marinated stuff and then I've had I actually cooked for Superstar Prince for half the concert parties in London and the restaurant was asked to produce I was asked to produce my style of Caribbean cooking which is quite creative at the time it was very exciting and what happened was that we cooked huge amounts of food because he was going to entertain like 200 people and you know the food had to be nice and interesting but also to feed people that you don't know we didn't know them and so we cooked huge amounts of food and then I think the company I can't think what they called now wasn't Virgin it was the other one whoever booked me anyway we can't tell you where you're going to be serving the food until the very last minute because Prince's security you know we can't do that so we get all this stuff loaded into the van and then they say okay could you go to the top of the Hilton please and we shoot off to the top of the Hilton and you find there's no cooking facility there's no reheating so everything had to be absolutely hot unarrivaled served up produced beautifully so the stuff would be decorating so food is different wherever you're going to it just depends on the situation the occasion and so on it is very different cooking in the kitchen at home that's great thanks Rosamond that's a great story Joe could you tell us a bit about the history in the cooking shops and the places that were set up well first of all primarily it was always the home visiting friends and relatives you would always be fed I think that was always like a given that always seemed to be food in the pot but one of my early experiences of experiencing different West Indian food was church everybody would bring their home food cooking and you'd taste different things and then you'd go to church conventions and it was in Birmingham that I discovered they made dumpling that was big and that it had the meat inside never seen that before in my life not in Leeds but it made a lot of sense and I don't understand why we haven't franchised that it's a great concept to have curry chicken inside the dumpling on the go brilliant idea and shops came around in the 1970s of course there was funerals and weddings there would always be food for sustenance and if you couldn't wait for a funeral or wedding then there was the blues there was the blues party that started late at night you'd go down into somebody's basement there'd be a hatch you give them the money you get your food you hold your corner against the wall and you eat your food and the base is pumping and everything sweet but when it came to shops and having to produce regularly which I'm sure the other speakers will testify to it's very difficult to sustain quality especially getting the staff as well I think in West Indian shops and some of my relatives open shops and it's incredibly hard work and you need a network around you but still to this day for me there's no substitute for home cooked food even if it is then put into a reheatable pan and taken somewhere it's cooked in the home it's very different from the shop and I still have go for home cooked food above shop food today thanks Joe I'm going to ask my last question before we go to the audience Q&A and it's about the relationship between food and community and Rosamund I'll start with you and I wanted to know how food has shaped your response to the pandemic last year yeah I know oh yeah that was very challenging for me first of all my household the key workers frontline workers and so I actually left my home because I had to isolate obviously that's what people of a certain age had to do and so I went to stay at an empty family flat fortunately so that was the first challenging thing that I was then cooking for myself I don't think I've ever just cooked for myself so I started producing food for the family and they'd come round and I'd handed to them at the front door because I just you know you want to cook for your family and of course they missed it and then talking to the neighbors in the road I was living in we found out that there was a food bank nearby and we were donating tins and so on and so forth because Parangay is a pretty needy borough and we were just supporting the families that were going to the food bank and then I had this idea to offer my services because I thought I'm sitting here feeling a bit lazy you know and so I went down to the local food bank and say you know I can cook can I help you kind of thing and they snapped me up and from there on the journey I've been doing that for about a year and a bit and basically you know there's a food hub I knew nothing about this a year and a half ago but I do now so there's this big sort of church hall basically full of food and so I'd go in with my mask and what happened was I had started doing it on my own and I had a lot of resources and then some kind person said to me oh you know it's not sustainable you can't do this you can't just keep donating food and I'm talking about cooking about 50 meals every Thursday 50 and 70 meals and so they said it's not sustainable and I thought why do I want to give back I don't want to take from families and I said no but if you cook the food we have here we're giving it to families so I said okay that sounds alright so I'd go in and it was really interesting actually because you walk into this church hall and it was just full of all kinds of food it's like being you know a master chef they have the mystery box be given a mystery box and I didn't know I look around and think okay where do I start here and so I start in my head thinking what can I make from the resources over here and some of them were limited sometimes they get lots of donation of fruit and veg and that kind of stuff and sometimes you just have lots of tins and lots of pasta and lots of rice and stuff and so I go around and just choose the things that I can visualise a dish from and I offered Caribbean vegetarian and vegan food because it's too complicated cooking meat and stuff and I wanted to popularise vegetarian and vegan food if it's really important I mean I don't eat meat anyway so I gather up lots of tomatoes and lots of fresh produce and then they give you tinned stuff as well and I come back home and I've got a Greek a stupid neighbour next door and she saw me bringing all these things in and she said okay I'll help you to peel and so she actually would peel 10 pounds of potatoes 10 pounds of carrots 10 pounds of onions and she'd peel and chop everything the day before and then we keep it in the fridge and then the next day on a Thursday morning nobody phones me because what I'm doing is assembling food you know in huge saucepans and cooking from scratch and that in itself is a challenge because whereas I can chop some potatoes and put it into a saucepan and just make a vegetable stew I had to think of ways to maximise on that so the potatoes I'd shove them all into the oven on two huge trays and I'd season the potatoes with herbs and spices so it gets the flavour and I think about vegetarian food some things can be quite bland but I think it was a meat and so I'd season up the potatoes or carrots or whatever shove them in olive oil shove them into the oven and push them down and then it meant that I could have volume cooking in the saucepan then I'd tip it all in at the last minute and so you come up with these really nice flavours and then I have to pack them and label them again cooking for the public you've got to be aware of all the food laws and so you have to label them into plastic containers and I'd be labelling well I'd labelled the night before I made the labels up and one of my mistakes one day was that I was so used to throwing things in and I suddenly thought oh my gosh I must follow what I've designed i.e. on the label because of allergens and things like that so you have to be so careful to put exactly what it says on the label into the saucepan and so that was quite a challenge and I'd pack it all up and I'd take it down to the food bank and there'd be queues of people going to get other food going to get their shopping and stuff and what was so heartening one day is that somebody said to me there's some Romanian women they're waiting to talk to you because they want your recipe and things like when is that Caribbean woman bringing her food it always went hot because I wake up at about 7 and by 10 30 it was all done and I take it down there it was hot and fresh and they appreciated it and what's so nice is knowing that the food I was cooking actually it went right across races because there'd be black people in the queue, Asians in the queue there'd be Eastern Europeans in the queue and people just loved it I just couldn't produce enough really Thank you Rosamund I'm just going to cut you off there because we've got so many audience questions and lots of them are actually directed to you but I will say that Haringey is very lucky to have you and I'll start off so we've got Sunita and Sunita has asked questions you've talked about bringing Caribbean food into the home and how important it is and third generations in the UK who may not have such a big influence from Caribbean culture in their lives where do you start with food to help bring it into the home any advice on who to follow or easy recipes to start with and where to start That's me I'll start, I'll re-ass off Yes, I need a breather You can just go on Instagram Instagram or YouTube and type in Caribbean food and you'll find all the people doing amazing Caribbean food both in the UK and the USA Canada, Jamaica of course yeah, throughout the Caribbean that's the great thing about the internet and social media now is that you've got the access to this knowledge just like right from the source and no matter kind of what your outlook on food is if you're vegan, if you're avid meat eater or seafood you'll find something for you Thanks Riaz Rosamund, do you want to come in with a recipe? Instant quick recipe What I would say is to take what Caribbean food is about so you don't have to have yams and plantains and so on and so forth necessarily but what you need is to use the techniques that we use, for example when I've got quite moment I make my own green seasoning for example I would spring onions, onions, sweet peppers green preferably and ginger lots of garlic and onion and perhaps some herbs, everything fresh and blitz them in a blender and put them in a jar and a scotch bonnet I would say one scotch bonnet could be quite hot so blitz them all up put them in a jar and this comes out of our throughout the Caribbean islands this green seasoning exists in Guyana we make one as well and that's obviously where mine comes from but you can put your favourite things into that and you keep it in a jar in the fridge and you use it to season up some chicken rather than just having plain chicken you can also do that with a spice mix you get all the dry spices keep them in a jar and so the essence of what we do so well in the Caribbean is seasoning up something to make it taste fantastic thank you I'm going to I've got another question for you a different one and this comes from Patricia Patricia came from a family who is a change maker where jerk originates and she says she's watched what she's called jerk change hugely over the years what do the panellists think about such changes is it evolution or dissipation of a tradition I don't know sorry I didn't mean to interrupt let's go Joe and then Riaz I'll try to be quick on this yes I mean there was a big ferrari around jerk rice being a thing and I think it's evolution you can't put anything out there that can't be appropriated by others because West Indians are notorious for taking things from here taking things from there and putting it all in a pot that's the tradition it's not nice when it happens to us because of the history because of so many things taken away if you go back to the Benin expedition in the late 1800s where Benin was destroyed when they raided the palace at Magdala and took significant religious and cultural items we lost our freedom during transatlantic trade please don't take our food but part of food is about sharing we can't stop that what we have to do is to be more inventive you named Portland and Jamaica where jerk chicken is done we'll give it the name Portland Jerk tell the story of Portland so that we know that it's a certain kind of jerk with a certain kind of quality and not to be confused with everything else so let's give things names it's a very rich heritage and there's a lot of diversity as Riaz was saying in Jamaica but there's also generosity because it was demonstrated by feeding people we're very naturally generous let's not lose that thanks Joe Riaz do you want to come in I was just going to say the issue of that kind of change a lot of the times the danger is that the origin is lost obviously as you mentioned that the Caribbean is so diverse and the influences that went into the creation of the Caribbean are so diverse but a lot of the kind of things that occur now in a lot of the things that occur now in the UK are so overtly capitalist and money driven if you look at the way that food evolved up into a certain point in the Caribbean it was purely to do with survival and then after that survival there was a lot about tradition and keeping culture and heritage alive especially as you mentioned the transient nature of the Caribbean the diaspora so spread out around the world it was really important to keep that culture and heritage alive but the change and evolution now we see just looks to just capitalise on it for the kind of the glam and the exoticness of it and the origin is forgotten so when you have things like as you mentioned jerk rice it completely destroys that chain and that link to the origin heritage when you think about what jerk is and what it means and the importance of it for Caribbean history yeah we've got to be careful that doesn't get lost and destroyed but that's up to us to positively promote rather than let it evolve we really have to take active intervention but also I mean when I went to Jamaica a couple of years ago and we were disappointed in the jerk because they were pandering to tourists and some tourists don't want pepper, some people don't want garlic you know I'm thinking stuff like why cook your jerk you don't have to put tons of pepper in it but cook it authentically maintain that do you know what I mean and people can buy it or leave it but I think it's been watered down and myself and the children were very disappointed I must admit but then you get very good jerk chicken in London there are lots of places you know top them in other places they tell millions of people these days Rosamond we've got a question from you and this is from Julia Alexander and she said it's wonderful to hear you connect our cooking with African Diaspora I'm a huge fan, love your books and your wonderful restaurant Bambaya and Crouch End back in the day which was the go-to place for fabulous food and entertainment plus the fact that you cook for so many food banks during lockdown my question is how can we use our young British born black youngsters about healthy tasty Caribbean cooking yeah this is a steep one I must admit and thanks Juliet for the question how do we convince them I think you model it you know in the household my they're not all in the household my grandchildren are spread around a bit in different houses and be entertained every now and again and I introduce things so for example when I was growing up in Guyana your parents educated your palate by for example if you don't like spinach they mix it with chicken and spinach or you can have you sort of introduce things in that way you slip it in and you talk about it you talk about food you get them to help you to cook you know my granddaughter Jessica when I was doing the food bank she would be opening all the packages because you know when you pick up the food she would be opening the spices for me you get different companies giving different spices and so on to the food bank and I need them in bulk so she would spend a couple of hours cutting and saying this one smells good granny and what is this one and you're telling this and talking to them about food talking to them about and helping them to create if you're doing scrambled eggs if you put a little bit of smoked paprika in there or if you put a bit of this in it but really communicating with your children to food is really important helping them to see the goodness of fresh veg and fresh fruit also sort of used to going to schools and talk to children about food so if you're a Caribbean parent out in Leeds or wherever say look can I come and talk to the class about what Caribbean food is truly about and some children don't know they don't know that in a mars bar or whatever it is actually a real thing that grows on a tree coca pod just educate people about it I mean that's the best I can do yet thanks thanks Rosamund I think the topic of education and food is so important we've got another question from Philip Abraham how much do you think the availability or lack of particular ingredients shape the way that Caribbean food has evolved in the UK I'm wondering in particular if Caribbean meat dishes were easier to reproduce in the UK because pork, goat, chicken etc was already available but fish recipes don't seem to figure as much in the UK despite flying fish being the national dish of Barbados maybe because the kind of fish used in the region has been harder to come by I'll start with Riaz on this one I think it's hard to it's really hard to put into words the difference of flavour in the fruit when you get it directly from the source in the Caribbean or Africa compared to where you get it here and I think that really has an effect on the food and that kind of dynamism in the taste but I'd agree that up to a certain point availability of ingredients can happen per food's growth the fact that that hasn't stopped other cultures makes me believe that that's not the real reason that the food hasn't progressed to a certain level that other communities' foods have in this country Jo, do you want to come in on this? As we're coming closer time I just want to put a historical context going back thousands of years to Queen Hatshepsut of ancient Kemet or Egypt thousands of years ago we know she's the most powerful ruler of all time male or female and we know that because she expanded the empire and expanded trade she's the first person who's recorded to be involved in economic botany which is the foundations of transatlantic trade really but what she did was find different spices particularly in different places and that informs us that they loved spices in their food thousands of years ago this is something that came down to us in West Africa and it's not so much just the African traditions that travelled to the West Indies but as I was saying before the spirit in ancient Kemet they believed in Ma'at which had seven principles like truth, justice harmony, balance, reciprocity if you put those values in your cooking and it's part of your family values those are traditions that are kind of part and parcel with the traditions but we're in challenging times as well as it being difficult to get hold of certain foods we also have to think of carbon footprints and as Rosamund was saying we have to kind of rethink how we do things sometimes you don't have to do the same things that traditions have done but you keep the same spirit as Rosamund was saying we're nearing the end so Rosamund I'll just see if you want to chip in anything to that last question No, I've just learned something really important that you were telling about there Jo, it's really great to hear that I think if you're living in far and wide wherever you can go on the internet and get things you can import things it's not import to get things posted to you but if you want particularly it is available in England in London in particular but you can also just get all kinds of different herb spices etc and as Jo was saying the essence of putting your love and creativity into that dish you don't have to be able to get a plant if you're living in the way out in Scotland but it's about how you cook coconut milk that's very Caribbean we haven't talked about coconut it's the mainstay in one of our and you can cook vegetables down in coconut milk and pop the chili into it if you want do you know what I mean that's a dish from Guyana called metagy you can use anything you like in it the essence is the coconut milk cooked down and curdles over the food and then you can serve that with roast chicken or fried fish or anything Thanks Rosamund I think that is a delicious note to end things on and I think a really important message about being creative and harnessing what you have I just want to end with one last comment from Melanie Harnie who says I can't stop thinking about that dumpling with curry inside and I'd love to have dinner at Rosamund's and I'll just say a huge thank you to Rosamund, Riaz and Jo it's been a huge round of applause if we are in person right now and it's been such a pleasure to have you here and to get to ask you these questions and I've learnt so much and thank you for such amazing audience questions of everyone coming along and a big thank you to Holly Russell and everyone at the food season for helping to organise the event and of course the Eccles Centre that have supported the whole project don't forget to check out the Caribbean foodways blog by clicking on the link below and it's a lovely evening and a delicious dinner Thank you so much what an amazing event right at the beginning Rosamund said that her world is about feeding people literally and metaphorically and I think that this panel and Naomi have fed us all metaphorically I feel I'm hungry but I feel full with ideas and just wonderful thank you so much also wonderful to know I've been keeping an eye I've got people listening in from Florida from Ghana all over the world and all over the UK so that is just also wonderful so welcome to everybody who's watched and thank you for watching do check out our final event for the food season on Friday I mentioned it was about the High Street and childhood obesity should be a very lively and topical discussion do visit the food season web pages to enter our British Library KitchenAid competition you can win a cordless KitchenAid appliance a day on a cookery course and a signed copy of the wonderful the pie room by Callum Franklin so that's worth checking out before the competition closes on Friday so this is it for us good night for this evening thank you to KitchenAid for sponsoring us but mostly thank you to Naomi Rosamund, Riaz and Joe for the most delicious nutritious evening of discussion thank you good night