Of sweet hand and Sunday lunch

My brother’s treatment of his food, in my family, is legendary. My grandmother in Tobago used to make special arrangements for his arrival, all of which centred on food, and usually involved the slaughtering and stewing of a chicken, a yard fowl to be specific.

My father is different. He usually treats food as though it is a necessary inconvenience. He’d blow through the house, reluctantly scarf down the minimum amount of food necessary to keep skin and bone together, and then blow back out. "The man wouldn’t even take time out to eat! I sure he eh even taste the food!" my mother would exclaim exasperatedly. Now that he is back home and bedridden, he’s taken to having cravings for certain items but, "at least he’s putting on a little fat!"

The phenomenon of Sunday lunch in our family — and by extension, every Trinidadian home — cannot be denied. Growing up, the best meal was always served on a Sunday. During the week was give and take. You may come home after school to a great meal of dumplings, ground provision, cassava and "stew fish" as well come home to dhal and rice and a face that told you questions dared not be broached. Saturday always was a hodgepodge day, with no significant meal attached. Unlike my aunt’s house where Saturday was soup day — a big tureen of hot, thick soup with provisions "standing up like man" next to the delicate florets of cauliflower dropped in just before "taking off the stove."

But Sundays. Sundays meant moms getting up early and going to the market. It meant endless blending and cutting and grating and seasoning and tasting and stirring and raising fire, no lowing the fire, lighting the oven, careful, careful! It meant several meats and beans and rice prepared in varying examples of flamboyancy. It meant an assortment of salads - macaroni salad, even though different types of pasta other than macaroni had been used to make it, "fresh salad" cole slaw, corn and beets and some sort of pie.

Growing up, this pie was traditionally macaroni pie and it still remains the favourite, even though others have enjoyed brief reigns of supremacy.

Nowadays, even though my mother has loudly announced her retirement, and even though she may not cook on any other day of the week, Sundays still stir her matriarchal sense of duty and she produces the necessary Sunday lunch of the standard we have grown to expect. The quickest way to ruin a Sunday in my house is to cook a pelau. It never ceases to shock, the sight of the one, large, iron pot defiantly covered with pot spoon displayed maliciously on top.

No matter how splendid the accompanying salad, no matter how succulent the meat, it could never compensate for the lack of pots lined up copiously on the stove top, counter top and in the oven. And it was exacerbated by the fact that we knew we would be eating pelau again the Monday. And the Tuesday. And enough would remain to catch us off our culinary guard some day later down in the week.

I had a coworker who worked every other Sunday with me. She refused to come to work before her meal had been cooked and she refused to cut back the number of items she prepared. "Debbie, you cook pork today?" I would ask her, her family’s love of pork being well known in the subspool. "How you mean, if I cook pork? Of course! Lemme not cook it nah, them boys will eat me raw!" She sympathised with the pelau as Sunday lunch ignominy.

And I don’t care what anybody else may say, Trinidad and Tobago has the best food in the region and I am willing to bet the world too. St Lucians, granted, know how to prepare a wicked steamed fish. And hats off to Jamaicans for inventing jerk — even though we Trinis have perfected it, and I stand by that and yes, I have eaten Boston jerk. And I’ll grudgingly admit that their festival is a culinary masterpiece. Bajans, even though they damn fas’ and claim pelau as their own, make a mean cou cou, or as they say, "meal corn cou cou."

The thing is, traditionally it has been served with flying fish, and seeing that they overfished all theirs (and putting God out they thoughts and coming behind ours) I guess that means ours is the best now. Nyeh!

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