E1 - The Blacker The Pot

Speakers: Catherine Ross, Lynda Burrell, & Riaz Phillips

[Music Playing]

Riaz: My mother's Dutch pot.

Joceyln: A poster, which is a map of Barbados.

Male: My grandmother's suitcase.

Female: A flyer with this system on it.

Catherine: We all have one of those objects, don't we?

Lynda: Something so sentimental, we've had it for years.

Catherine: And losing or breaking it is not an option.

Lynda: These objects tell a story about us.

Catherine: About our lives, upbringing, and family.

Lynda: And for Caribbeans whose stories are often left untold, we are bringing these stories to the fore.

Riaz: They're just pots on a surface level, but they're kind of loaded in history.

Male: These flyers would've been going back to the seventies, so it brings back great memories.

Catherine: This is Objeks & Tings.

Lynda: A podcast celebrating Caribbeans and my favourite tings.

Catherine: Episode one, the blacker the pot.

Lynda: Hello, and welcome to Objeks and Tings, a podcast where Caribbean share their stories their way.

Catherine: I'm Catherine, and that was my daughter, Lynda. And together, we are the National Caribbean Heritage Museum: Museumand.

Lynda: And today, June 22nd is really important and a special day for us because it's Windrush day.

Catherine: Yes, I can't believe it's been 75 years already. So, for those who don't know, 75 years ago today, hundreds of Caribbeans invited by the government came to help rebuild Britain.

The first arrivals came on the Empire Windrush. This was the first of many ships that would take people from all across the Caribbean to the UK. Most to work, many to study, and others to settle here and make Britain home.

Lynda: So, today, is clearly a big day. And what better way to celebrate than to start our own podcast? It's based on a book we wrote called 70 Objeks & Tings, looking at 70 objects that the 184 people that we actually interviewed said were important. Some of the things that came from the Caribbean, and some of the things that we found when we moved to the UK.

And it's a really nice book in the fact that these are real Caribbeans telling their own story, their own way, and we've just put the book together.

So, the way the book is compiled is each page tells a different story of an objek or ting. And that's a bit like what we're going to do in our podcast.

Catherine: Each week, we'll be inviting a different guest onto the show to talk about their most precious possession, and then, we'll use it as a jumping off point to reminisce and tell stories about Caribbean life in the UK.

Lynda: So, I think it's time we've heard from today's guest, Riaz Phillips.

Riaz: Hi, I'm Riaz Phillips. I'm a writer, an occasional video maker from London, and I'm the author of Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK, West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica.

Catherine: And although Riaz has written many books about Caribbean cuisine, he doesn't actually identify as a chef.

Riaz: No, I definitely wouldn't describe myself as a chef. In my head, a chef is a very like professional endeavour. Just even the skills of being able to chop certain things really efficiently, like all those things I don't have at all.

Catherine: Riaz has family from all over the Caribbean, but his immediate family is from Jamaica, which is where his object is from too. I'm going to let Riaz reveal what his objek is in a moment, but I'll give you a few clues.

Riaz uses it in his line of work.

Lynda: Ah, something to do with a restaurant or food.

Catherine: Yes, you are getting close. Now, here's the next one; it's named after a country, but it's not Jamaica.

Lynda: So, something to do with cooking. So, but a calabash or … oh that's not a country. I shouldn't say jerk pan, but that's also not a country. I give up.

Catherine: Okay, as you're never going to get it, here's Riaz to put you out of your misery.

Riaz: My object today is my mother's Dutch pot. It's called the Dutch pot sometimes known as Dutch ovens. They're just pots on a surface level, usually made from cast iron or lately aluminium. But they're kind of loaded in history and culture and they've been part of like West African culture passed down to Caribbean culture for centuries.

When they're first built, they're kind of like spotlessly, shiny, polished metal. But over the years, when you cook with them and you use seasonings like cumin and curry powder and the oils, eventually that starts to build up.

And along with the fire that you keep applying to them over the years, eventually, they turn from a pearly silver, and they start going slightly brown and eventually, they become like pitch black.

And a lot of people think that's where the magic comes from, those years of seasoning, that builds up and sometimes gives a flavour that you can't like recreate anywhere else.

My pot in question belonged to my mom. And then of course, when she passed away, it became mine. And there's a particular memory I have of this Dutch pot when I was preparing for my first cookbook, West Winds, and I was making curry goat. I tried to make it a few times before at my own place and it just didn't taste right, it didn't seem right.

So, one evening, I went to my mom's place and just asked her like, “Can you help me with this curry goat?” But in the evenings it's kind of like my mom's downtime. So, when she was describing how to make it, she was also speaking on the phone to her cousin at the same time, like talking about EastEnders or something.

So, she had the phone on her ear in one hand and like a spatula in the other hand like showing me like talking and managing both conversations. And I think that's very typical of older aunts and moms, especially in my background community. Like a lot of the kind of elder matriarchs are incredible at multitasking.

They can like hold a baby and feed a baby or change his nappy and do something else at the same time, which is a skill like I definitely don't have.

So, as I said, she was just showing me with a spatula in some tongues, how to brown the meat in oil and let it soak first on kitchen paper, and then seasoning the goat, putting the powders into the oil, mixing them.

If you've ever cooked any style of Asian or Caribbean curry, like the smell immediately takes over your house when the powder or the season meat touches the oil, it's like an explosion of smells.

So, fortunately, we have an extractor, so you know something seriously is being cooked when you can hear the extractor fan. You leave the pot for a couple hours on simmer, like you can hear the bubbles if you're attentive enough.

And yeah, you come back every so often to check on it and give it a little stir. And I guess after about three hours, if you're not using a pressure cooker, it's ready. It tasted great.

Slightly salty but not too salty. Like a strain of heat from the scotch bonnet, but not too much heat. Really tender meat. Balanced well with the potatoes, tasted like nostalgia, like how it was made when I was growing up.

[Music Playing]

Catherine: From hearing Riaz speak, you really get a sense that every Dutch pot has a story to tell.

Lynda: You do, don't you? And not just about the family that owns it, but also the history it’s a part of.

We caught up with Riaz to discuss the Dutch pot in a wider sense including the part has played in Caribbean life, both here in the UK and in Jamaica, as well as all of the delicious things we Caribbeans like to cook in it.

[Music Playing]

Catherine: Hello Riaz. Hello, and thank you for joining us today.

Riaz: Thanks for having me.

Catherine: Do you think the food tastes different dependent on what it's cooked in?

Riaz: Yeah, actually I do. I think when something's cooked in a heavy-set pot, like a Dutch pot or a skillet, it has the ability to cook like slower and longer without getting burnt or overcooked at the base.

And sometimes you find when you do a big cook of rice on a thinner pot, the bottom of that big rice and peas is always going to have that like burnt lining, which some people really like, but I'm not a huge fan of.

Lynda: Oh, I'm a fan.

Riaz: Yeah, some people are. I don't begrudge it.

Catherine: Yeah, there have been fights in families to get that burnt bit off the bottom.

Riaz: Yeah.

Catherine: It's very popular.

Riaz: Actually, I'll tell you the time I do like it is when you make corn milk porridge, and you have that burnt bit.

Catherine: Yeah.

Riaz: They call it bun-bun. I love that. I do like that.

Lynda: Once I was going to get some street food, Caribbean street food here in the UK, and they didn't want to sell the last, the last portion and I was like, “Oh, been working late. This is the only time I could come to get the food.” The woman said to me, “Oh no, it's the burnt bit on the bottom.” Like “That's the best part, I'll pay you double.”

Riaz: No, should just said, “Oh okay, I'll pay you half.”

Lynda: Oh yeah, next time, next time.

Actually, I can remember the first time I went to Jamaica with my dad because my dad's was Jamaican and my mum was from Saint Kitts, and at this point, they were divorced. I'm not bringing it down, I'm just telling you the truth.

And I can remember going to daddy's family's home which was up in the bush, and we were driving up to Red Ground and we saw this man on the side of the road and he was making Dutch pots.

And daddy like got the driver to stop. You know how you also have a driver in the Caribbean to take you up in the scary bits because they drive quite recklessly in the Caribbean compared to the UK. And daddy made the man like screech to a halt and he pretty much bought every single Dutch pot there, all for family back in the UK.

And I was thinking, because I was quite young, and I was thinking why is that man sitting on the side of the road making a pot in this heat? Why is daddy buying them all? Why don't we just go to John Lewis and buy them all somewhere like that?

At that point, I had no idea how important the Dutch pot, the Dutchy, the Dutch oven is to our community and to our culture. But now, looking back, I'd love to have gone to that man, asked him some questions, but at the time, when you are seven-years-old, you're like, “That's a bit strange.”

Catherine: When I arrived in the UK from the Caribbean, I was surprised at how small the sauce pins were because we have such large families. But they were made out of aluminium then, and for me, it didn't seem to make the food as sweet.

Lynda: I remember you telling me mom and some of the Windrush generation that we work with, telling me the stories about how they had to use those sauce pans that we had in England at the time.

But as soon as their family members and friends were coming over, they would ask them to bring the good old Dutchy with them. So, then we started getting them in England as well.

So, from ‘48 to about, I think it was mid-fifties people didn't have the Dutch pots. Then eventually, they started coming in in droves and everybody started having a Dutch pot that was Caribbean in the UK because we realised-

Catherine: A feature in many Caribbean homes.

Lynda: Definitely, definitely.

Riaz: No, it's quite interesting to hear the dissonance between what people were told it was going to be like in England and what actually it was on arrival, what they expected.

I heard a lot of people from older generations from recordings and stuff I listen to who like they couldn't even believe that there were like poor people in England. Like they couldn't believe that there was like an underclass. They couldn't believe like the conditions that like other English white people lived in when they came.

Lynda: That's so true. You said things like that, didn't you mom about road sweepers and the like?

Catherine: Yeah, it was strange seeing white people doing menial or blue-collar jobs. It was like no, but that's the norm.

Lynda: You were saying before about building the taste over time when you cook in a Dutch pot, and it reminded me of that old Caribbean saying, the blacker the pot, the sweeter the food. Do you have any other food sayings that you can share with us?

Riaz: Can't remember verbatim, but my uncle would always have this saying about like, like the stew's not going to cook quicker if you keep looking at it.

Lynda: Oh yeah.

Riaz: Because we'd always be like peeking into the pot and like hovering around it and asking when it's going to be ready, and like yeah it was just like this idea around like patience because actually when you keep taking the lid off, the pot like slows the process a tiny bit.

Lynda: That's so true. I remember on Sundays when my parents were together then and my dad would cook because my mum doesn't cook. Tell you more about that later but mum doesn't really cook. And we could never wait, and I was a little, little fat child.

So, I can always remember with the chicken, daddy would always give us a chicken neck a bit earlier. So, I always have to get the little chicken neck and suck on that and gnaw on that until the rest of the meal was ready. So, it's true, we do need patience.

Riaz: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because I never like chicken or turkey neck, but everyone in my family's always got these like small little bits that they like the most So, I've got one cousin who's like, don't even bother trying touching the neck because you already know it's for her.

Like she loves it so much. So, you just know that's like her piece, and I've got my little bits that I like the best and yeah, my treat was always the dumplings and the stew and the soups. That was always the thing that I had like, neck.

So, my mom would always be furious because she'd come back from work like the next day to cook a soup and the whole soup's there, but every single piece of dumpling's gone.

Lynda: And boiled dumplings are the best. Fried dumplings are nice, but boiled dumplings are the best. But even better than that is when we usually my gran would slice them up the next morning and fry them. Have that with like egg and bacon.

Riaz: Oh yeah. Boil and fry.

Lynda: Oh, my goodness. That is my absolute favourite thing in the world.

Riaz: Yeah.

Catherine: I found as a member of the Windrush generation who came here quite young, in school meals, you had dumplings and I'm expecting the sort of dumplings you'd cook in a Dutch pot, and I'd get soggy dumplings which was nothing like what I was accustomed to.

Riaz: That must have been traumatising.

Catherine: It was. it was soft and pappy and whatever. And a good dumpling is one you bite into, and you remember. Some people even say the noise of biting into the dumpling, all of that adds to the excitement of a meal.

[Music Playing]

Lynda: Catherine's not a great cook as I've said, but she's an avid reader and she loves reading. I'm actually saying that we both love your books. She's not going to be inspired to cook. She’ll be inspired with everything else.

Riaz: No, that's fun.

Lynda: But we both do love your books. Where does your inspiration come from?

Riaz: I've always been a big fan of coffee table photography books.

Lynda: Me too.

Riaz: And so, I'd always go into like my local bookshops and just like spend ages in there just looking at the books, the way they were composed and just like the topics of the books.

And it was a couple years ago now, where I started to see a lot of these kind of style of books dedicated to London and British culture. And more often than not, they would always completely like ignore or avoid Caribbean and West African culture in the conversations so that there'd be food guidebooks around London or East London, and they'd have no black people in them at all.

And I always thought that books are so powerful that in a hundred years’ time when people look back, if these books are the only ones that exist, people are going to think that we were never here.

And so, I just thought like I could try my hand at trying to remedy that because I'm not one to ask other people for inclusion. I'd like rather go out and just like try and make it happen in myself.

Lynda: Amen.

Riaz: And that was, yeah, that was the genesis of it.

Catherine: Brilliant, brilliant.

Lynda: I also think because I do enjoy cooking and I love watching cooking shows and reading cookery books, that sort of thing. But I always think that when English people, British people make something that's tasty, they make such a big deal out of it.

Whereas Caribbean food, our food's always tasty from frying an egg to how we do our baked beans. It has flavour, it tastes great. We don't have anything that's bland, do we?

We don't even write our recipes down. We just know. We can tell by taste our hand, our eye. It's not such a big deal, but I think we need to like how you are, make a big deal out of it and celebrate it so people realise how we live, how we cook and how it's in our veins really, isn't it?

Riaz: Yeah. I remember reading this joke on Twitter about how Europe colonised the world for its spices and barely uses them. And that has always stuck with me, like all that trade.

Lynda: Yeah, yeah, it’s so true.

Riaz: To get all the spices from like India and parts of Asia, and they barely made it into like common British cook. I mean, it's changed over the years for sure, but still, it's quite ironic.

Catherine: I found when I first arrived in 1958, people were sprinkling their salt and pepper on top of everything. So, any seasoning was put on top of the food, not pre-seasoning the way that we do, and leaving it overnight to marinate. And I think that helps the sweetness that we referred to our food is always sweet, tasty.

Riaz: Yeah, long seasonings.

Catherine: That's right.

Lynda: I know that you grew up in London and you now live over in Berlin. Did you take your Dutch pots with you?

Riaz: I did, yeah, when I moved. I don't have too much stuff, so fortunately, in my suitcase I was able to pack a bunch of stuff. And it was interesting because I've kind of in a different way, felt a connection to my family who had like packed their suitcases and moved from like the Caribbean to England in the same way that when I moved from England to there, I had like my suitcase and I packed like tins of ackee and tins of callaloo, and I had my Dutch pot in there, and I had like all-purpose seasoning and curry powder.

Lynda: And how is it? Is it quite easy to get Caribbean ingredients and food stuffs in Berlin?

Riaz: Well, yeah, because the thing I tried to point out in my writing about Caribbean food is people think that it's this kind of alien culture in a vacuum. But when you look at the fabric of what makes the Caribbean, West African, Indian, Chinese, parts of Europe, parts of Latin America …

When you branch out, you realise all these ingredients are utilised by all those other cultures in the same way or maybe different ways, but the existence of those ingredients are universal across those regions.

So, while there's no like Caribbean grocery shops in the same way we have in England, but using a combination of the West African shops, the Indian shops, the Chinese and Vietnamese shops, I’m pretty much able to find everything apart from ackee.

Catherine: Right, right. But it's very similar to what it was like when we, the Windrush generation arrived in England. We got a lot of our stuffs from continental shops (they were called in those days) because they were similar to what we were accustomed to.

And then eventually, Asian food stores and Caribbean’s food stores and now, there's a plethora of West African food stores. So, yeah, we are in a very privileged position nowadays, but those early days, it was, “I want some rice.”

And all you got when you went to an English shop in the forties and fifties and asked for rice was pudding rice — rice pudding for making rice pudding. And when you asked for peas, you've got green peas instead of kidney beans or anything like that.

Lynda: So, we're nearing the end of our podcast. We always like to end the podcast with a saying. Do you have any family sayings or sayings that you think would be good to round up our conversation today?

Riaz: Off the top of my head, I can't remember any of the sayings. They were never like sayings. It was like always remarks.

So, one thing I just remember, every house saying was like, adult shouting to kids, “You're too fast!” And that's always stuck in my head like no matter … whatever the topic, whatever you're trying to do, you're trying to like go into the pot to get some food, like you're trying to move something too quickly.

You're trying to act up, you're trying to talk in a certain way, that was just every auntie just like had that saying. Yeah, I think I love those full circle moments because now, I'm older and they're younger kids in the family.

Like I find myself getting really irate by the things they do and telling them the same things, and I'm like, oh, this is how you become like an auntie and uncle.

Lynda: Yeah. It's so true. I'm always saying to my niece and nephew, 7 and 12, “Stop fussing up yourself.” It's so true. You become your parents, don't you?

Riaz: Yeah, yeah.

Catherine: But that saying of yours, I think, is really interesting because when that's said to a child, they're in a process of discovery and long leave the fact that children will push boundaries and try and learn. And there's a lot that we have learned from you today about food. And so, thank you very much for that.

Riaz: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[Music Playing]

Lynda: I love that Riaz didn't have a saying, (more of a command), but it's one that I remember daddy saying to me, “You're too fast, you're too fast.” It really sheds light on Caribbean parenting.

Catherine: Yes, Caribbean parenting is a case traditionally of tough love, but it's also of much love.

[Music Playing]

Lynda: So, sadly, that's all we have time for today. We really hope that you have either learnt something, reminisce with us, or at the very least, got a little bit hungry.

Catherine: Or all three.

Lynda: Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you have a moment or two, we'd love a review.

Catherine: Yes, they really help to spread the word.

Lynda: Tune in next week when we'll be speaking to Jocelyn Chandler Hawkins about her objek or ting.

Catherine: It's something that might help you find your way when lost.

Lynda: But until next time, bye-bye.

Catherine: Bye.