WHAT I TREASURE

Fried plantain

In 1977, when I was seven, I stayed with my grandmother for the first time, for the whole of the school holidays. It was the year fried plantain entered my life.

I don’t remember visiting her before these holidays and I’m pretty sure I’d never had the joy of sleeping over. The housing estate Granny lived on fascinated me: there were always people coming and going and there was always some kind of cooking, including the Jamaican interpretation of an English fry-up, going on in the kitchen.

Fried eggs, baked beans slow cooked with fried onions, fried dumplings, hot dogs sliced longways and golden fried plantain all piled up on a smoky brown Pyrex plate with a side of Mother’s Pride toast smothered in Flora – and all for me..

My mother had a shared kitchen and all I remember her cooking was pasta. My foster parents had been meat and two veg people – filling but not fascinating. I can still see my seven-year-old self watching Granny slowly slicing through a plantain and her placing the food of gods in her Dutch pot.

In 1977, plantain became my happy food, one I now eat any time of night or day to nourish my body and my soul. When I eat it, I know my ancestors walk with me. Food is a cultural connection that transcends

generations and continents. Plantain couldn’t be found in any supermarket when I was a child. My Granny would travel from Kent to Brixton on a Saturday afternoon to buy hard-food and saltfish wrapped in old newspapers. If she was lucky someone would have recently returned from Jamaica bringing with them plantain, mangoes and metre-lengths of sugar cane. A sensory overload for a child from Kent who’d never been further than Bromley.

Plantain, like my people, is not native to the Caribbean. We both arrived there by boat, without choice and made the new lands our home. I’m sure as well as providing food, the plantain tree, with its umbrella leaves, protected my ancestors from the rain, the sun and the slave catcher.

We may be separated by generations, seas, continents, political and moral injustices, over hundreds of years, but I hope all the women in my family have sat down to enjoy fried plantain, because my soul tells me it runs through us like concentric circles and we are forever bound in its golden hue.

Plantain, I now realise is more than a delicious snack or a cultural signifier – plantain is life.

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