“If I could mix drinks like my grandfather I would be worth marrying”*: Reading race, class and gender in Mrs H. Graham Yearwood’s West Indian and Other Recipes (1911 and 1932)

ABSTRACT

Very few early cookbooks have survived a fragile archive in a West Indian context and, to this day, West Indians tend to eschew written or printed recipes in favour of individual culinary improvisation and/or oral family traditions. This article discusses the light shed by an early West Indian cookbook on an often-overlooked minority tradition of written recipes produced by and for the “white elite” Euro-Creole and colonial expatriate community of Barbados. The text reveals much about the culinary and material culture and codes of a colonial society starkly divided along class, gender and racial lines, and about an elite eager to gain cultural and culinary capital and to consume material goods as a sign of upward social mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Cookbooks
• Barbados
• Euro-Creole
• oral tradition
• Austin Clarke
• George Lamming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Mrs Bessie Yearwood (1849–1915) was married to Mr Graham Yearwood. He and his brother were member of the Barbados Assembly in 1914 and were living at Friendship Hall in St Michael’s Parish. Mrs Yearwood’s family came from St George’s Parish, Barbados, although her paternal grandfather, Mr Jasper M. Manning, had been born in England and her father, Mr Charles Jasper Manning, had been educated at Oxford University in the 1860s.

2. The Advocate newspaper was also established in this year and is still published today. It is the longest continuously published newspaper in Barbados.

3. Comprising: Miss Anderson, Mrs Austin, Mrs G. Brown, Mrs Bovell, Mrs J. Bovell, Miss Briggs, Mrs J. Brown, Mrs Browne, Mrs Cotton, Mrs E.T. Cox, Miss Crone, Mrs W.C. Clarke, Miss E.T. Cox, Mrs H. Deighton, Mrs Foderingham, Mrs L.Greaves, Miss Hammond, Cook Harris, H. Haynes, Mrs Hobson, Mrs J. Howell, Mrs Lawson, Mrs Lawrence, Mrs J. Manning, Mrs T. Manning, Mrs Manning, Miss Packer, Miss Parloa, Miss H. Philips, Mrs Phillips, Miss G. Richards, Miss Sanderson, Mrs Simpson, Miss Skinner, Mrs J. Thomas, Mrs C. Trimmingham, Miss R. Wheatley, H.G. Yearwood. My copy of the 1911 edition was owned by a Miss C. Camplin and my copy of the 1932 edition by an Ava B. Booth, who notes the place as Barbados and the date as 1935.

4. This is the classic cornmeal cou cou, but cou cou can also be made from the pounded dried flour of green plantains (known as conquintay flour), or from flours made from cassava or breadfruit. Winifred Grey (1965) notes that “cassava coo-coo and cornmeal coo-coo can be made to the same recipe. They are much the same as the American johnnycake and can be served as a side dish at lunch, or cold coo-coo can be cut into slices and fried. In Jamaica, coo-coo is called ‘Stamp and Go’ ” (203). In the Dutch Antilles, cou cou is known as funchi and in Haiti as Tum tum. The larger history of cou cou includes its relationship to couscous. The Brazilian version, called cuscuz, can similarly be made with the corn to accompany a stew. I am indebted to Dr Ross Forman for his careful reading and this latter point.

5. I am indebted to Dr Ross Forman for this observation.

6. The first three of these brands still exist. Van Houten’s was established in Holland in 1828 whilst Runkle’s is American in origin and dates from the early 20th century.

7. I am indebted to Dr Ross Forman for the basis of this final point.

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Sarah Lawson Welsh

Sarah Lawson Welsh holds a doctorate in Caribbean studies (language and literature) from the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick. She is currently associate professor and reader in English and postcolonial literature at York St John University. Her most recent research is centred on Caribbean food cultures and Caribbean writing on food across a range of genres. Her new monograph, Food, Text and Culture in the Caribbean, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2019. Recent publications on food include “Caribbean Cravings: Food and Literature in the Anglophone Caribbean” in Donna Brien and Lorna Fiatti-Parnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (2018); “On the ‘Not Translated’: Rethinking Translation and Food in Cross-Cultural Contexts”, Journal of Multicultural Discourse, 2017; “Performing Cross-Cultural Culinary Discourse: The Case of Levi Roots” in Wiebke Beushausen, Anne Bruske, Ana-Sofia Commichau, Patrick Helber and Sinah Kloss (eds.), Caribbean Food Cultures: Performances of Eating, Drinking and Consumption in the Caribbean and its Diasporas (2014); and “'A Table of Plenty’: Representations of Food and Social Order in Early Caribbean Writing, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010)” in Entertext 10 (2013). She also publishes on Black British and Caribbean literature. Recent publications on this topic include “Black British Poetry” in Edward Larrissy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Poetry 1945–2010 (2015); and “Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry” in Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein (eds.) The Cambridge History of Black and British Asian British Writing (2018). Her books include the co-edited Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for a New Millennium (2010); Grace Nichols, in the British Council Writers and their Work series (2007); and the co-edited Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996). She is one of the founding members of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.