Stories told at My Mother's Recipe

Tuesday: Soup with Side o' Fruitcake

This is a story told to me by our friend Janet.

When Janet was 12 years old, her mother emigrated to the United States. In Jamaica there were many families like hers, where moms or dads had to work outside the country to support their families. The act of leaving in order to strengthen a family's resources was a powerful act of love and sacrifice, but to twelve-year old Janet, it represented it's own challenges.

As the eldest daughter, the duty of care for Janet's two siblings and father fell to her. This of course included preparing meals for her family. At twelve years-old her experience was limited, but she devised a schedule to provide structure and routine to the task. She decided to prepare soup on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

Tuesday's soup was heavy and hearty, the kind of soup that sticks to the ribs. On those days she assembled the soup as she had seen others do: beans, pigeon peas, or "Gungu" as it is called in Jamaica; a small piece of cured meat like pigs tail or neck bone, and whatever vegetables she could get at the Saturday morning farmer's market, shopping as she had with her mother in earlier days. Saturday's soup was a thinner soup, chicken or beef (just enough to flavor, because meat was expensive) with vegetables, and maybe some pumpkin. The other days were a mixture of things: a sandwich, or curry.

Since most of Janet's early food memories have to do with developing recipes and routines on her own out of necessity, it didn't occur to her that she would have a recipe to share that was uniquely her mother's. Yet suddenly, somehow, our discussion triggered the memory of her mother's world-renowned fruitcake--steamed, not baked. Janet told me that people would clamor for this delicacy, over which her mother labored mightily and proudly.

Janet recalls that toward the end of the summer months, her mother would soak currants, nuts, raisins and orange peel in Jamaican white rum. By November, the baking began. Cake batters were mixed, poured into covered baking tins and placed in boiling water in a large zinc container, a stone on top to keep them in place as they were steamed. The end result was moist and delectable "Black Cake," which her mother mailed to her sisters, brothers and other family members at home and abroad, to England and other parts of Europe. Janet beamed while sharing this account, her face brightened, her smile widened and the whole conversation became more animated. I detected more than a hint of pride in the telling, and we both could taste that cake as though it were sitting on the table between us.

Some of us cherish memories of deeply nurturing culinary traditions, others remember loved ones who couldn't cook, wouldn't cook or simply couldn't be there to cook. Yet even in these cases, in some quiet moment a memory emerges--like that fragrant fruitcake--that connects us to our past and to the essential truth of our relationships, with all their frailties and strengths.

Menna

2017 October 10