Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit: Rituals of Slave Food

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

“Slave food doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the soul. ... It
has everything to do with the belly.” With a wonderful style that
starts out with just a trace of Caribbean flavor and builds to the
roiling boil of a Barbados pepperpot, Clarke tells us what he wants to
put in his belly—a whole mess of “historical and cultural
goodness.”

There are no recipes in this work, but the whole book is a recipe for
creating food in the slave tradition of the islands. The food stuffs,
the folk traditions and customs, the economic conditions, and the spices
and cooking methods Clarke experienced in Barbados and, later, in
Guyana, permeate the book in the same way that the thick aroma of a
spicy stew permeates a small kitchen. It gets on your skin, in your
hair, on your clothing ... saturates your thoughts, all the senses, and
the mind. The book is alive with the essence of slave food. To read it
is a total sensory experience.

On this winding culinary exploration, Clarke introduces the mysteries
of cooking “bakes,” “privilege,” salt beef, pig tails,
“dryfood,” ham hocks, king fish, cou-cou, pork chops, chitlings,
souse, black pudding, pelau, pepperpot, chicken, even split-pea soup and
“drinking food.” This is up-close and hands-on cooking. We’re
there when the pig is slaughtered, when the sweet potatoes are stolen
from the plantation, when both hands grope in the brine barrel for the
best bit o’ pig tail.

Cooking is an adventure, Clarke says. To read this work is to become
immersed in that adventure, to share his conviction that food is
something with which you have to improvise until it makes you feel good
and gives you “big-big brains.”

Definitely not to be missed.