| A Review of: Love and Sweet Food: A Culinary Memoir by Brian FawcettAustin Clarke's Love and Sweet Food is actually a reprint of a
book Clarke published with Random House about five years ago under
the title of Pigtails n Breadfruit. The subject is the food he ate
and learned to cook while he was growing up in Barbados. It's a
shame the book was underdistributed the first time around because
it's a great read, and Clarke knows what he's talking about. It's
as much a work of cultural analysis as it is a cookbook, although
the recipes are all there, and they're not hard to follow despite
Clarke's charming if occasionally annoying use of dialect.
Be forewarned. This isn't the food you'll get in a Barbados 4-Star
resort. It's local food, the recipes (Clarke takes great pains to
explain) that sifted down to the present from the black slaves who
populated the sugar and banana plantations on the island. Mostly
it isn't particularly subtle food, but it is serious cuisine for
all that, and the several recipes I've tried are excellent. They
didn't make me feel as if I could go outside and lift the front end
of a dumptruck as Clarke suggests they would, but they were delicious,
and the food did stick to my ribs as advertised.
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