‘The magic started with tinsel and spicy stews’
Rachel Edwards shares how, growing up in the UK, she discovered her Nigerian and Caribbean roots via food.
My earliest Christmas memory is of deliciousness. Not turkey or Christmas pud, although those treats would soon follow. I must have been five when my mum, Patricia, gave me a spoonful of a light stew, brimming with dried shrimp and gooey with okra, hot with pepper and unknown spice. I lifted it to my lips and… wow! I gulped down an unforgettable hit of my father’s Nigerian homeland.
The laughter ricocheting around our Hertfordshire home that year announced that Uncle Okwong, my dad’s gregarious
younger brother, had come to stay. We ate the stew with stodgy balls of garri – think of it as West African mash – and we were actually encouraged to use our hands! Cue feasting, eyes wide at this cultural revelation. Christmas had begun.
My sister, two brothers and I were the first of our family to be raised in England, by my Nigerian father and Jamaican mother; true second-generation Black
British kids. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Christmas was a big deal for us because the festive season was when we caught up with our extended family. As – quite literally – the only Black people in the village, this mattered.
We would visit my Jamaican cousins on my mother’s side in London. Those early Christmases were also brightly strung with British traditions – a blur of presents, carols, tinsel and all the garish decorations I adored.
And now? I have morphed from wide-eyed child to wide-eyed adult, marrying Peter in 2014 and bringing up twin stepchildren, now 24. My role has transformed from Christmas Baby to Mother Christmas, with all the magic that entails. But my father and many of his generation have passed on, which means fewer get-togethers to relish a Nigerian stew.
We’ve recently moved to Somerset and, in our 17th-century farmhouse,
I’ll roast a turkey, make cranberry sauce on the
Aga and bake mince pies.
But I will never once forget that the magic all started with too much tinsel and spicy stews. I’ll raise a glass to my late father, to the Nigerian uncles and the Jamaican aunties. And, if you look closely at the Aga, there may be a little pot bubbling away that is more callaloo – think Caribbean spinach – than sprouts.
• Lucky (4th Estate) by Rachel Edwards is out now
‘The festive season was when we caught up with family’