My friend and counterpart Bobby once commented that he could never learn French. He said the language just tasted bad in his mouth. I had been on the island for only about a month or so when he said this, and I was still very much in the throws of my culture’s mind – a Tennessee redneck with Frenchafied intentions. Looking back, after a year of adapting to Jamaican culture, I realize that the French and the Jamaicans are at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum in this world – that when Bobby said this, I was getting a very good perspective on things to come.
The French are some of the thinkinest people in the world. Everything about there history, language, and art reveals a culture that asked God too many questions. The result is a bunch of people with too many recipes and philosophers. In no other culture is it really acceptable to have a job as a philosopher. Think about it.
Before I go any further I would like to disclose my love and undying affection for French people, Francophiles, and everyone else that acts French and wishes that they were French. I mean them no harm.
I mentioned recipes, so that will be the first item on the agenda. First, Jamaicans love their food. If you ever find yourself in the position of preparing food for a Jamaican then you better be cooking Jamaican style, because they won’t be eating it if you don’t. What is Jamaican Style? Well, the best way to explain it is by comparison. For the French, cooking is an art – a way in which the cook expresses his or her skill and creativity. For Jamaicans, cooking is a science. One day Boy Boy (that’s a guys name) asked me if I could cook…just like that. He didn’t ask me whether or not I was a good cook mind you, because for Boy Boy, and millions of Jamaicans just like him, one could not be a good cook or a bad cook, for there is only one way to cook, and if you don’t do it right…you can’t cook.
When Jamaicans refers to food, they are referring specifically to yam, dashin, dumpling, potato, pumpkin, renta, green banana, and breadfruit. There are two ways to cook food – you roast it or boil it. When you boil food it is referred to as running a boat (for obvious reasons). Each one of these articles takes a different amount of time to cook in the pot, so…if you can cook, then you don’t just put everything in there all at once. I once started to cook for Dowdy and one next youth in the night. I don’t know what I was doing that offended them so much because I had only begun to sauté (mind the French word) when Dowdy and my other guest outright refused to eat what I was preparing. So I guessed that Jamaicans are so unfrench that they don’t even sauté.
Jamaican cuisine is more of an institution than it is an art. Whether you are preparing “food”, fried chicken, any number of the curried meats, or rice and peas, the way to cook it has been codified – and there isn’t really much use in preparing something that hasn’t been codified, because then, (to a Jamaican) there is no real way to determine whether or not it was cooked right.
When food is fresh in our culture, then that is usually a good thing. In Jamaica, fresh means that food does not have enough sugar or salt. It also means that salads are not a part of their dietary institution. Sugar is something of which Jamaica has in abundance. That is how I learned that when a poor man has an abundant amount of something – he uses the hell out of it. When a Jamaican fixes tea, they might as well be preparing cane syrup. They probably fill about a third of the cup with sugar. I once set out to fix myself some tea when I realized that I did not have enough herb to make it. Well, I wasn’t going to let a cup of boiling water go to waste, so I put a Jamaican serving of sugar in the cup…stirred…and you know – adding a tea bag really wouldn’t have contributed much to the drink. This whole time I had been wasting perfectly good sugar water by contaminating it with herbal tea. So when a Jamaican says tea is fresh, then it means to say that it doesn’t taste like cane juice.
That’s nothing though. Somewhere in history, or on the TV, something instilled in Jamaicans an unwavering hatred for frogs. Maybe Jamaicans were never exposed to Kermit. This intolerability for such a docile creature, paired with that of the snail, is most akin to a Frenchman’s hatred of George W. Bush. – Two cold blooded creatures they have enough of in Jamaica, and two creatures that, incidentally, are an important facet of French cuisine. Nothing unites Jamaicans more than their hatred of frogs and most importantly, their disgust at the thought of eating frog legs. Actually, that could completely explain Jamaican’s fear of foreign food. I had a Jamaican girlfriend that would never eat any of my cooking and I think that she had an honest fear that I was going to feed her frog legs without her knowledge. I realized how severe and honest her fear was when I made a little joke about slipping some in when she wasn’t looking – I think that was when our relationship started to go down hill. Come to think of it – that would be the sure firest, most creative way to commit suicide – feeding a Jamaican frog legs without them knowing it. I know a guy in town whose cat ate a frog and he chopped its head off.
