EMMA FREUD
Our columnist talks to the chef and TV and radio presenter about Caribbean food. Turn to page 128 for Andi’s Wadadli stew
Our columnist meets the host of BBC Two’s Great British Menu, Andi Oliver, who shares a Caribbean recipe
Andi Oliver is a powerhouse. Host of BBC Two’s Great British Menu, star of BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet and BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen Live, she has now launched Andi’s Wadadli Kitchen – a multi-pronged movement to celebrate Caribbean recipes and challenge age-old gastronomic stereotypes. We met, and cooked together, on Zoom. This woman is an actual dynamo.
Emma: So, why Wadadli?
Andi: People have this weird idea about Caribbean cooking; that there’s jerk chicken, rice and peas, coleslaw – and that’s your lot. It’s quite difficult to get really good Caribbean food unless you go to a Caribbean household. A lot of the time even when you go to a Caribbean restaurant, it’s generally pretty poor. The last time I went to Jamaica, the best food I found was by the roadside – a lady roasting yam in hot coals with cornmeal pudding, and salted mackerel wrapped in foil which she stuck in the fire. When the food is good, it’s so good.
E: What makes the food culture on the islands so interesting to you that you want to champion this movement?
A: I actually feel quite emotional about it. I’m fascinated in the journey that it takes to get a meal onto a plate. There have been so many influences passing through the Caribbean – the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the Chinese, the Irish, the Indian-asians – and they’ve all left their DNA in the food. So on each island there’s this incredible wealth of knowledge and interesting iterations of dishes. For example, if you go to Trinidad, the food is really Indian, because loads of Indians came there as indentured workers after slavery. In Guadeloupe, it’s French, in Barbados there are influences from West Africa and Britain, and Antigua has its own cuisine. There’s all this knowledge and I realised there’s no existing book that goes into depth about the breadth of it, nowhere to find out about it and nobody to champion it. There’s so much people don’t know.
E: You’ve talked about there being a racist element in our lack of acknowledgement about
Caribbean food culture. How do you tackle that?
A: Of course there is. It’s colonialism – an idea of cultural colonial superiority.
You can’t change people’s minds by hitting them over the head, but if you can just let people experience it, that’s how change happens. We did a massive launch at Somerset House where we had big king prawns on the barbecue with coconut chilli lime butter, and our version of jerk chicken with our own spice rub, which we stuffed in little brioche-style ‘coco bread’ [a bread made with coconut milk] and served with a smoky sauce. It’s the best way to deal with that kind of cultural superiority. Kill them with love, I say.
E: Part of your mission is to champion diversity – how have you reflected that in the people you work with?
A: I think you have to live and work as you want the world to be around you. Fred Sirieix and I ran a
Wadadli Caribbean pop-up restaurant last year called One Love, and we made sure that our recruitment drive was really diverse. We had people of all different sexualities, colours, cultures and ages. We wanted it to be as the world around us is.
E: Is the Caribbean food you cook very traditional? A: Sometimes – but it’s informed by me being British and being here. It’s interesting, lots of immigrant people hold on to traditional ways of cooking because food is your identity and it anchors you to the past, your family and your history. It’s the same with Italians – if you try to change a classic pasta, they lose their minds. When my mother-in-law passed away, we made traditional brown stew chicken, fried chicken, curried goat – we needed it to be comforting. So I do think it’s important to have that knowledge.
E: But that’s not the way you do it?
A: I think it’s good to sing your own song and spread your own wings. I don’t want to make the same kind
Food is your identity and it anchors you to the past, your family and your history
of brown stew chicken for the rest of my life, I’d die of boredom. And cooking for me is an art form, it’s a way of expressing the internal voice that drives you to do what you do. So the food that we do at Wadadli isn’t traditional, it’s based on all the flavours that I grew up eating, but then I’ve added myself into the mix. For example, in Antigua, they have smoked chillies and they have tamarind – but they don’t necessarily combine them. But we do, and we serve a smoked chilli tamarind barbecue sauce – it’s glorious.
E: There’s so much respect for French and Italian cuisines in the mainstream, and so much less acknowledgement for minority cultures, even though their food history may be equally interesting.
A: Ah, it drives me absolutely bonkers. You know, to be able to balance a perfect Northern Thai curry takes such skill and training. To make an Antiguan pepperpot takes years to learn but they are never given that respect – it’s a Eurocentric bloke thing essentially.
E: You’re right, and it’s only just struck me – I’ve always been told that the French are the gold standard in food. I’ve never even challenged it.
A: And they’re not. It’s just a different way of doing stuff. These other cuisines aren’t lesser, they’re different – and those differences are exciting. What I like best is when all the worlds collide, when everything meets in the middle. I love the precision of traditional, French, classic cooking, and when you put those skills together with a whole bunch of other influences, that’s my favourite thing in the world. That’s when the magic happens.
E: How has this last strange year been for you?
A: It’s been such an odd year, so disastrous for so many people. But one good by-product is that people are really appreciating their little local shops, their community, their neighbours. In lockdown, my cousin went to a butcher for the first time in her life, and she loved it – it’s really made her think about not going to the big supermarkets all the time. I live in Hackney and we have the most brilliant Turkish and Kurdish shops overflowing with huge bunches of oregano, lemon thyme, basil, mint. It’s a thing of beauty. People are looking out for each other, people who didn’t know their neighbour’s names a year ago are suddenly chatting. We’re making sure our communities are alright, and I think that is amazing.
Andi Oliver has launched Wadadli Caribbean meal kit boxes to enjoy at home – order online at wadadlikitchen.com. You can watch the entire series of this year’s Great British Menu on BBC iplayer.
Good Food contributing editor Emma Freud is a journalist and broadcaster, director of Red
Nose Day and a co-presenter of Radio Four’s Loose Ends.