Foods I was given to eat as a child

Foods I was given to eat as a child.
 By Randall Butisingh

 They say that laughter is good medicine.  I am a person that does not laugh much.  Others would laugh at anything, but while reading the lecture you sent me, written by Guyanese Dave Martins on growing up in Guyana, I had a few good laughs as it brought back many memories. My family lived in Buxton and I could see myself a boy again at Christmas time with my pepperpot and bread in the morning washed down with a glass of home-brewed ginger beer. Later a slice of pudding with some more ginger beer and then running out to meet my friends with my little 12 cent toy pistol and shooting at them.  My mother lived in the village among the Blacks.  Her friends were all blacks and she could have cooked all the creole dishes.  We had  soup on Sundays, sometimes with beef,ochro and fufu, or with barley and chicken. I did not particularly like plantains, but fufu had a flavour I liked.  Sometimes we had it with curried fish.  In those days fish came to your door - two kwakwari for a penny or my mother would go to the drainage canal and throw in some flour and the little silver fish would come swarming, and she would scoop them up with a basket.

 Some days we would have metemn. This was my favourite as we always had duff in it.  There was nothing I liked as much as duff. Duff is made from flour, a little brown sugar, and a pinch of baking soda to raise it. I would leave that for the last after I had eaten the plantain, the eddo, the sweet potato and the fish. Then I would drink the broth which had the coconut milk in it. Some days we would have dry food which was boiled provision and fried sliced cartwheel onions swimming in it to dip our vegetables.  I remember the times we had cook up, a mixture of rice, one of the peas - split, blackeye or pigeon - ochroes and pickled mixed meat and pigtail. Then the days when we had konky, black pudding and roast-corn..  Dave mentioned paynoos.  That was the first and second day milk from the cow after it calved; the milk would curdle when boiled; sugar would be added to it. I was a lover of sugar and my hand was often in the sugar jar when I couldn’t get money to buy sweets. Even today, in my old age I like sweet things.  In my 95 years of living I calculated that with a minimum of an ounce a day, I must have eaten approximately a ton of sugar.  It is a fallacy that too much sugar causes diabetes.  Too much starches cause it; then after having diabetes, you cannot eat sugar.

There were the days when I was given a penny to buy my lunch and I would go to the cake shop and buy two sweet buscuits or a big bun for a cent and a half pint glass of mauby.  Saturday nights, we would go out on the road by Bhajan rumshop and there were the women with their bottle lamps and baskets of bread and fry-fish. Others with cakes like pumpkin pone, corn pone, bruk-mout, turn over, sugar cake and ginger cake.  I particularly liked the ginger cake; it was hard and brittle and lasted long. we used to call it shingle. Some of the boys who preferred bread but could not afford the fried fish would eat their bread with pepper sauce. In those days you could go in a shop and buy a penny loaf of bread and ask the shopman to daub a little salt butter on it or give you a piece of salt fish which you would eat raw with the bread. Raw salt fish was called cartman cheese.

These memories flood back after reading Dave’s Lecture.  Today, I do not eat meat,  I  prefer a vegetarian diet, but I sometimes eat fish curry and daal puri, cookup rice with fried ochroes and sometimes fried fish,  but my favourite is Daal and rice with stewed boulangers, pumpkin or spinach, a vegetarian dish.  In India where the people are chiefly vegetarians, daal, the various kinds, is used as the chief nutritional diet.  I also eat vegetable salad and much fruit.