Not just for Christmas: An Arawak guide...
Kehelikota From 3A
the ‘yaray’ or fresh cassava water boiled to make a sauce without extracting the ‘espuma’. It is also a family dish from which every member of the family partakes. Like the kadakura, pepper may be placed in the pot but not burst so that everyone in the family could eat from it.
As a child, I tried eating all types of pepperpots with varying levels of pepper heat. I also recall when other family members did their cassava work we waited to ask them for some cassava water and they gladly gave. The cassava water in its varying forms was never sold as it is today.
As I write I am relying a lot on my memory. I asked two young people if they knew what keheli and kehelikota were. I was not surprised they did not know. I recalled my cousin the late Sister Theresa La Rose telling me about keheli and kehelikota, which I thought I knew but which I clearly misunderstood. She had said, “You must know your Amerindian foods and never be ashamed of them.” I hope Sister is smiling at me from above while I write about these very foods.
Kehelikota is the dish that is cooked with any meat from the liquid that remains when the espuma is extracted from the cassava water.
A lot of thyme is used in the preparation of any of the pepperpots. In my late maternal grandmother’s and mother’s home, the herb, culantro also known as bandanya or chadon beni was added especially for fishbased foods. I continue that tradition.
And while the kehelikota is not creamy like the kadakura, the toasted cassava dust left on the baking pan after baking the cassava bread may be added to the sauce to thicken it and give the dish more flavour.
Partially roasting chicken before cooking it in any of the sauces or pepperpots gives it an added unique flavour.
Any meat whether it is fresh fish or fresh meat, smoked fish or smoked meat, salted or corned meat may be cooked in any of the pepperpots.
Kwaharo
I had forgotten about ‘kwaharo’ but my cousin Graham reminded me. Kwaharo is a very spicy cassava water pepperpot in which parts of the crab including the crab
Kwaharo
belt aka ‘wayuko’ is cooked. It is found mainly during the April and August crab seasons.
As a child I recall seeing my great grandmother Julia Torres bent over her fireside, tending to her kwaharo and hoping she would give me some. She never disappointed.
The side dish for all the pepperpots in the home of Indigenous People in Moruca is mainly cassava bread, especially the fresh thick ‘arasoka’ while homemade bread is eaten nationwide with the cassareep pepperpot.
With the exception of kwaharo any meat could be cooked in the other sauces.
Anyone knowledgeable in the Arawak language may correct me if I am wrong. I wrote mainly from a Lokono (Arawak perspective).