Taste of the islands eases COVID gloom
LONDON — Glenda Andrew pulls a tray of salmon from the oven, filling the community center’s kitchen with the aroma of garlic, cayenne and lemon rising from its crackling skin.
It is the scent of memory, of family dinners and church socials — the warmth of the Caribbean in the middle of a gray English winter made gloomier by COVID-19.
This is food for the soul, Andrew says, and it’s needed now more than ever by Britain’s older immigrants who have been isolated from friends and family by the pandemic. Once a week, the 57-year-old joins other volunteers to prepare hot meals with the zing of the islands, which they distribute for free to people
in Preston and surrounding communities in northwestern England. The area has recorded some of the U.K.’s highest coronavirus infection rates.
“It’s a great way to connect and build that relationship, but I didn’t know that at the time,” Andrew said
of the project’s beginnings. “I just knew that I wanted to do something and make sure that they were getting a hot meal — not sandwiches, not soup — getting something that they’re accustomed to eating and hope that they would enjoy it.”
Once a week, for the last 42 weeks, the lucky seniors on Andrew’s list have been treated to delicacies such as jerk pork, curry goat and cow foot soup accompanied by rice and peas, yams and plantains. Portions are hefty, so there’s enough to go in the freezer for another day. Recently, some 400 meals were delivered by volunteers.
The meal program grew out of Andrew’s work with Preston Windrush Generation & Descendants, a group organized to fight for the rights of early immigrants from the Caribbean and other former British colonies who found themselves threatened with deportation in recent years.
.Andrew wants to keep the meals flowing, even as optimism grows that Britain’s mass vaccination program may soon allow lockdown restrictions to be eased.
One of the most attractive aspects of making a cake with oil rather than butter is the way it expedites the mixing process: There’s no waiting for butter to come to room temperature, and then beating it with sugar before you even start to add the rest of the ingredients. The batter is ready to go into the oven in 5 minutes flat, and the cake comes out just 40 minutes later.
With many oil-based cakes, you simply whisk the dry ingredients in one bowl, whisk the wet ingredients in another, and then combine the contents of the two bowls.
The dry ingredients were all-purpose flour, baking powder and salt, and the wet ingredients were eggs, milk and olive oil.
Also on the list: sugar and lemon zest.
We wanted our olive oil cake to have a light, fine-textured and plush crumb, with a subtle but noticeable olive oil flavor.
Whipping the sugar with the whole eggs, rather than just the whites, produced a fine texture that was airy but sturdy enough to support the olive oil-rich batter.
To emphasize the defining flavor, we opted for a good-quality extra-virgin olive oil and supplemented its fruitiness with a tiny bit of lemon zest.
A bit of advice: Don’t panic when the cake puffs up during baking. This is just air released by the cake batter getting trapped beneath the layer of melted sugar, which adds a crackly crust for a touch of sweetness and sophistication. The cake will settle once it cools.