Lakshmi travels well

Indian Sweets By *Adam Aitken*, poet, *writer* and *food photographer*, Australia

“Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.” V S Naipaul, Trinidadian writer

I started writing this blog, inspired by Diwali and the food and warm feeling I associate with it. Although it is a Hindu Festival, it is not the religious aspect in particular that I feel connected to, rather it is a sense of heritage and identity that move me. Lakshmi, who is honoured by Diwali, sat among the revered murtis (statue of a deity) in my Grandma’s living room, and together, the two of them made Diwali a lasting family tradition. They created a sense of belonging and hope when Diwali-time came around, which I have kept and carry with me.

According to the Times of India, Indians make up the largest population living outside their country of birth. It‘s no surprise when you look at the back story that there are now around 18 million migrants living abroad. The expansion of the British Empire, as well as that of its European imperialist cousins’, resulted in the making of one of the world’s significant Diasporas. Together, and often in agreement, they transported thousands of Indian labourers to the Caribbean, Africa and parts of the South Pacific and South Asia from 1830s to 1920s. It is through these ancestors that Indian religions, customs and beliefs have sustained, and sometimes, evolved outside of India.

The popularisation of many religious events and festivals around the world, has put Diwali, among other celebrations, on the international calendar. Around this time of year, Indian recipes and ingredients appear in the supermarkets’ glossy magazine specials and television food shows are brimming with Indian cooking content. Long-time chef, Mary Berry, widely renowned for her British baking and cooking, recently departed from her regular format to visit a London-based family celebrating Diwali in her current television series.

In spite of an increased market culture of commercialisation and promotion, it is the Disapora’s deep rooted affinity with Mother India that its descendants have honoured and conserved. Through the generations, the Diaspora has cultivated an unbreakable sense of self which I see in Indian families and communities. I learnt of it too, in a subtle philosophy that infused my childhood with the small things in daily life and beliefs and thoughts that belong to an Indian-ness. While Guyana was the place we as a family were from, I understood that so too are we from India. It was this duality that, universally, older generations had to reconcile. Now, generations on, add in another migrant journey and I am also a Londoner.

In lockdown-London, for this year’s Diwali I was a bit ambitious. I’d made a trip to my favourite supermarket with a long list of dishes in mind that I had planned to prepare. I bought ingredients you would undoubtedly expect for the occasion: fresh coriander and fenugreek, garlic, ginger and turmeric roots, ghee (clarified butter), besan (ground chick-pea flour), okra, potatoes, aubergine and more. But I also made sure to get some pumpkin, guavas and scotch bonnets because the Guyanese, and in fact, the Trinidadians and Surinamese version of Diwali has a distinctive Caribbean lilt.

Fresh turmeric, ginger, green chilies, okra, mangoes, guavas, limes and fenugreek leaves.

Jaggery (cane juice slab), golden sultanas, cloves and cardamom pods. Ingredients for the popular sweet, parasad.

I had planned to make a green mango chutney to go with poulouris (spiced yellow split pea batter with spring onions and deep fried into balls), unmistakably an Indian-derivative street snack and found only in the Caribbean, as with dhal puri (a roti filled with spiced ground yellow split peas) and baiganee (aubergine slices deep-fried in a spiced batter).

Despite having helpers, I never got to the mango chutney or the baiganee. By the finish though, I had managed something of a feast. The dining table was graced with dishes and sweets from Guyana having made their way there from India many moons earlier, and somewhere in there was probably a little London-ness too.

Below, is my offering to you: two favourite recipes that always appear in the family Diwali feast. I hope you enjoy them, all year round.

Pholourie (spiced yellow split pea balls)

½ cup yellow-split peas, soaked in cold water for around 4-5 hours
½ cup plain (all-purpose) flour
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda or baking powder
2 cloves garlic, peeled
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
½ teaspoon ground roasted cumin seeds
½ teaspoon garam masala
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon of salt or to taste
3 spring onions, green parts only, finely chopped
1 red hot chilli, finely chopped, optional
vegetable oil such as sunflower, for deep frying

Drain the split peas, reserving about ½ cup of the water.
Put the split peas, ¼ cup of the water and garlic into a blender and process until a thick batter. Add more of the water if, necessary, in order to obtain a thick batter.
Using a wooden spoon, stir in the dry ingredients until well combined.
Stir through the spring onions and chilli, if using.
Taste a small amount of the batter and adjust seasoning, if needed.
In a wok or heavy-based pan, heat the oil until hot. The oil needs to be hot, before smoking point is ideal.
Once you have the oil at the right temperature, you can begin to cook the pholouries.
Forming the pholouries:
By hand: using your fingertips and thumb, scoop up a portion of the batter. Using your thumb to swiftly transfer the mixture, lower it gently into the hot oil. The pholouries should float to the top immediately, this indicates that the oil is hot enough. Allow the pholouries to cook until golden, turning with a slotted spoon so that they colour evenly.
Alternatively, you can use two spoons to drop the batter into the hot oil. With one spoon, take a spoonful of batter and lower the batter gently into the hot oil using the other spoon to slide it off.
Drain on paper towels. Continue to cook in batches.
Serve with a green mango or tamarind chutney or a good Caribbean hot pepper sauce.

Serves 4-6 as a snack

Pumpkin Curry

3 tablespoons vegetable oil, such as sunflower
1 medium brown onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 green chilli, (or a banana chili or scotch bonnet), finely chopped, optional
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon garam masala
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1lb (500g) pumpkin (or butternut squash) peeled, seeded and cubed
around ¼ cup water
salt to taste

Heat the oil in a lidded karahi or heavy-based medium sized saucepan.
Add the onions and allow to cook on a low heat for around 10 minutes, stirring occasionally until they are a deep golden colour.
Add the garlic and chilli and cook for around 1-2 minutes, stirring regularly.
Add the spices and cook for around 5 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent the spices from sticking and burning.
Add the pumpkin cubes and coat well in the spice mixture by stirring through.
Add the water and stir. Cook with the lid on for around 20-30 minutes or until the pumpkin is very soft. Once soft, break up pieces using the back of a wooden spoon so that the pumpkin is mostly mashed.
Serve with rice, paratha rotis or puris. Dhal also makes a good accompaniment.

Serves 4

From Letter to Marco Polo by Adam Aitken, Australia

MENU
Beef curry & Chicken curry & chutney
& dhal last night, tonight vegetable
curry & leftover Port Vindaloo with
cucumber & yoghurt as a
                                                 side dish,
Was it like this in Mountbatten's time - 
this anglo-Indian post-coital bliss??
Consider Newtown's very own Swami's motto:
"My cooking is the result of
Indian tradition & personal genius & charm"
(I misquote grossly but the sense is close.)
What better way to sniff fire
after a bad flu or too much Virginia Woolf
serialised on 2FC.    When Percival goes to 
                        INDIA
everyone gets pissed on nostalgia 
after bubbly & smoked salmon & 
sleeps with everyone else.    Dipti
(who's got a thrilling past in the
crazy Ceylon corridors of power) thinks
it's overdramatised.   When her Mum brings
a Red Cross parcel of  CURRY  &
a bottle of Rose Syrup we dream of
climbing Everest  /  flying high on
Hilary's vision of India, now going nuclear.

National Windrush Day

Today is National Windrush Day, a day to honour the British Caribbean community, who arrived between 1948 and 1971. My family are part of the generation of West Indians who came to Britain during that time, to help repair post-war Britain in the 1950s. So today, I’m taking a little time out to reflect on this day and on my family’s migration to the UK.

Having chosen to make London their new home in the 1950s, my grandparents anticipated a new and prosperous life in a land promising hope to generations. They set sail from Guyana’s tropical shores for London’s cooler climes. Their first cultural adjustment was the weather. Bitterly cold winters, with snow almost knee-deep in Finsbury Park had them questioning the joy and laughter promised to them on glittered Christmas cards. Winters in London turned my Grandma into an expert in layering and insulating the body, making us leave for school in Michelin-man style.

Naturally though, there were highs and lows to uprooting to a new country. The Windrush story can’t truly be told without acknowledging that racism hindered the ease within which the Caribbean community settled in. I know my grandfather regularly questioned why they had been allured to Britain, with its enticing advertising, when the reality was they were faced with barriers when trying to set up the most basic needs of a family, such as housing. Back then, it was standard to see signs displayed in windows saying ‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’.

The fight for equality and justice was always an undercurrent for the Windrush generations, and remains so. Yet, as I begin to surmise what it means to celebrate Windrush day, as a first-generation Guyanese, I think about the West Indian community as having intrinsically helped to shape what is British culture today.

Growing up in London, the Notting Hill Carnival was, for me, Windrush Day. The music, the smell of jerk chicken, sautéed plantain and saltfish, the taste of Guinness punch, and the colours, the lively shades of the islands. All of this was an emblematic celebration of the achievements of the diaspora. Sound systems stacked in the streets of Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road, transformed west London into a Caribbean carnival for a whole day. People came together on a summer’s bank holiday with Soca, Chutney, Ragga, Reggae and Rap vibrating deep into the soul.

When I take carnival out of the experience, I see my family and community settling in a place that they were both shaping and confronting. I see also my grandmother, a strong woman, gathering strength and resilience along the way. She, like other West Indians, made and sustained a life in Britain, a good life at that. Once she had worked through the tangled turmoil of British society, with all of its contradictory standards, she had a happy life. She belonged to a community with shared experiences, and spent time with friends and family, who she cooked for and laughed with, and cried with too.

This Windrush day, I pay respect to the generations who paved the way for us, and made it easier for my generation. I also celebrate the Caribbean heritage kept alive through families, grandparents and great grandparents. Today, of all the wonderful places I have been fortunate to live in and visit, with all their beauty and serenity, my favourite place in the whole world to be was at my Grandma’s kitchen table. The brightly coloured floral tablecloth, her kitsch salt and pepper shakers and homemade chutney, all props for the centrepiece, her life’s stories in Guyana. After cooking and eating together, followed by a dessert always served with ice-cream or custard, the radio playing, we would sit there for hours, just limin’.

Coconut Ice Cream

Photo by Michelle Garrett, food stylist Liz Trigg, from **The Complete Caribbean Cookbook** by Pamela Lalbachan

1 cup (8 fl oz/250ml) fresh coconut milk
1 cup (8 fl oz/250ml) fresh milk
3 tablespoons cornflour (cornstarch)
1 cup (8 fl oz/250ml) caster (superfine) sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons grated coconut
2 egg whites, beaten to soft peaks

Combine coconut milk and halt the milk in a medium saucepan.
Combine remaining milk and cornflour and add to the saucepan with the sugar and salt.
Cook over a medium/low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture forms a thick custard-like consistency.
Stir in the grated coconut. Allow to cool.
Pour the mixture into a lidded container, cover, and place in the freezer until it is partially frozen.
Transfer the mixture to a large bowl, add the egg whites and beat until smooth. Return the ice-cream to the container and freeze for 3 hours, then beat again until smooth and creamy. (Alternatively, freeze in an ice-cream maker following the manufacturers instructions.) Return to the freezer until the ice-cream is frozen.

Serves 4

Going bananas

Lockdown has fast become a ‘normal’ way of living but that’s not to say that some days I don’t wake up feeling like the one thing I want to do is to go out. Instead, I accept that life has gone bananas, temporarily. That said, it does seem that lockdown has brought out the baker in many of us. YouTube clips and Instagram inspiration are kick-starting dormant bakers everywhere.

My neglected fruit took me on a welcome journey this week and got me baking banana bread. I pondered the countless ingredient additions there are to a banana bread recipe.

Thanks to the supermarkets, corner stores and food workers many of us are not short on choices of fruit. Thank you, again, key workers for maintaining a steady supply of bananas to our supermarkets and local shops during lockdown. My deep gratitude is extended to the long chain of workers required to bring bananas from their country of origin to our local streets at this difficult time.

Every time I make banana bread, I think of Dominica where I once tasted a banana bread so delicious that it’s never been forgotten. A bunch of characteristic Caribbean flavours that run through the islands were brought together in one sweet, moist banana bread.

Bananas are aplenty in the Caribbean; finger bananas, sugar bananas, Cavendish, red-skinned bananas and more. Each variety carries its own characteristic flavour and levels of natural sweetness. So, for me, it’s no surprise that when I put ripe bananas, Demerara sugar*, nutmeg, cinnamon and allspice into a mixing bowl that I think of my Dominican banana bread. Actually, from these ingredients alone you get a compilation of island stories.

The Demerara sugar takes you to slave plantations and slave rebellions in the Demerara region of Guyana in the 1830s, (ok, it’s not an island). Nutmeg and cinnamon were among a collection of spices to name the island of Grenada ‘the Spice Island’ because of the world-leading levels of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and mace it produced. Allspice, loaded with regional revelations, leads you to the origins of the bbq where Jamaica’s indigenous people (the Taino) used the allspice berry branches to cook their meat. Indeed, the art of ‘jerk’ cooking emanates from the allspice berry lending itself to a cascade of recipe stories. As for the bananas, Day-O, Day-O, daylight come bringing many a song and story recounting a long history of banana labourers’ lives and fruit production in the West Indian economy that continues to the present day. And, if I were to add some rum to my mixing bowl, as I so often do, we’re in the territory of the world’s finest rums.

Bananas have been grown and exported from the Caribbean for centuries. They are an important part of the economies of many islands, such as the Dominican Republic and St Vincent. Once an important bread and butter industry, (no pun intended), bananas, along with sugar, kept the economies of the islands buoyant. Unfortunately, over the past decades, banana exports have massively declined, as large-scale production in other parts of the world has stifled the small family run farm and medium sized plantations in the wider Caribbean.

The Windward islands do still produce bananas only now on a much smaller scale. The politics of global economics has left the Caribbean banana industry suffering, despite the fact that the Caribbean, arguably perhaps, produces the most flavoursome bananas out there.

For me, the best bananas I have ever tasted were in the Caribbean. The region’s banana plantations struggle yet they manage to thrive, despite competition from mass production in other countries. Islands such as St Lucia and the Dominican Republic are assisted by Fairtrade so that they can continue to export bananas. I always seek these out when shopping because they tend to support the smaller producers in the Caribbean while also promoting the use of less chemicals. And, they taste good too!

Whatever bananas you chose, there’s no excuse not to make banana bread because we all, at some time, have overlooked bananas, forgotten as their hue drifts from sunshine yellow to deep brown. Well, most of us. As each day passes, they sit in the fruit bowl turning darker and darker while the sugar within reaches fermentation levels. At this point, you can either steal the moment, or you could forward plan and purposefully set aside some bananas to over-ripen for baking. The jury is still out as to whether you have to use seriously over-ripe blackened-skin bananas or just plain ripe bananas, but in my opinion over-ripened is good, it makes for a moist and flavoursome banana bread.

*origins of this variety of sugar is from the Demerara region of Guyana. A missed opportunity to give it a geographical indication of origin, perhaps, as many countries now produce demerara-style sugar, such as Mauritius.

Banana Bread

Photo taken from my book, The Complete Caribbean Cookbook by Pamela Lalbachan, Lansdowne Publishing

I sometimes add to this recipe a tablespoon or two of golden or dark rum at the point that I add the milk. It adds a little something special.

8 oz(250g) butter
8oz (250g) demerara sugar
3 very ripe medium bananas, peeled and mashed
1 medium egg, beaten
1 lb (500g) self-raising flour (or plain/all-purpose flour + 1 tablespoon baking powder)
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, or ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground allspice berries (if you do not have this you can omit)
½ cup of milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (vanilla essence is a good substitute)
1 tablespoon of dark/golden rum (optional)
1 tablespoon seedless raisins

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/Gas 4.

2. Butter a 9 x 5 inch (22.5cm x 12.5cm) loaf pan.

3. Cream the butter and sugar together until light in colour.

4. Add the bananas and the egg and mix well.

5. Sift in the flour (and baking powder if using plain/all purpose flour), cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice and stir well into the mixture until combined.

6. Add the vanilla extract to the milk and stir. Gradually beat in the vanilla-milk liquid, and rum (if adding).

7. Stir in the raisins.

8. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and bake in the centre of the oven until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean, about 45 mins-1 hour.

9. Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn the bread out onto a rack to cool completely.

Makes one 9 x 5-inch (22.5 x 12.5cm) loaf