Oil an’ rice.

23.7.23.

Hello and how are you today? What’s for lunch?

Practically every day, I have to cook rice or Ma doesn’t feel as if she’s eaten a proper meal.

Daal and rice with fish baked crunchy as if it’s fried. Rice and chicken and veggies. Rice and Guyana-style pumpkin, some shrimp on the side (for her), rice and boulanger…eggplant also known as aubergine…with smoked fish; rice and okro, sorry, I should be fancy and say okra, add some kippers cooked with paper thin slices of onion, chopped garlic and shallot tossed around in a screaming-hot pan. Sardine in tomato sauce with onion and some lime juice. And rice!

Cook-up with parboiled rice, okro, poi-baghee…the fresh, thick, dark green leaf, none of that limp-leaf full of fertiliser; half-ripe plantain, black-eye peas; not too much coconut milk because Ma’s constitution is a little frail these days.

Coconut. Coconut oil. Ding ding, rings a bell, ah, yes, I remember…

…One o’ clock sunshine is lighting up the kitchen in the rice-growing village, my mother is hungry for something different, she doesn’t want the food she’s cooked for us. I’m standing by the stove near the windows, staring in amazement at her preparing something I’ve never seen before in all my four or five years on this earth.

Steaming hot rice drizzled with warm coconut oil; ma sprinkles salt, thinly sliced onions, pieces of red bird-pepper, then she squirts a bit of lime juice.

She and I sit at the table and I watch her eat. She sanay…mixes…the food with the fingers of her right hand and feeds herself with her fingers.

With that same hand, Ma would feed li’l girl-chile me and Cousin Nan who lived next door. (Take good notes, Norway, this is not force-feeding a child!)

Ma would blow gently on the food in her fingers to cool it first, then one mouthful for Nan, one mouthful for me…not oil and rice, nah, no way, we nah eat dah…it would be rice and something tasty like halal corned mutton from Australia cooked with a vegetable. When little Cousin T. and my li’l sister came along, she fed them this way too. Corn nutton an’ scras…corned mutton and squash…how those two loved it. And egg-fry-rice with salt fish cooked with slices of potatoes.

That was the best tasting food, when we were hand fed.

Ooh, here’s something we loved, still do, that you might enjoy. Kheer…rice pudding…with elaichi, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar. Have you ever had that?

My mother sometimes made us a treat with rice mar. Do you know this one? When you’re done cooking the rice, if you strain the excess liquid, don’t throw it away. That’s the mar. Add warm milk and sugar.

Sugar and rice, oh so nice when you’re a child.

Mmm, sugar-coated crunchy squares of parched rice, mmm, rice-cakes. My parents, on their trips to town, would buy little bags of it for us. Sheez, after all that sugar, don’t forget the toothpaste!! Haha, if toothpaste were tasty, the people of GY would’ve lapped it up with rice.

Rice goes well with anything, yeah!

Rice flour and ghee, salt and sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, a sprinkle of black pepper and condensed milk make raham. I discovered raham as a child, at a home in the village; it was served after a snoring-boring-long function. The raham was grainy and soft and sweet and oddly delicious, it confused me; I didn’t like, I liked it, I kept pinching and tasting pieces of mine, puzzled by the strange combination of flavours and textures.

Speaking of odd combination! There’s one that I never knew about until I was yay years old. Chowmein and rice.

Nope, not chowmein and fried rice, which actually taste good together.

Plain rice. With chow mein.

Ee tas’e niiiiice, try li’l bit, nah?

I’m yet to try it.

Looking back at all I’ve said so far, I realise how rice has (ahem) glued us together as foodie-people in my lovely native land. We enjoy rice dishes of the descendants of Africa, India, China, all together making up Guyana’s multi-history cuisine.

History, yes, here’s what I’ve learnt. China was cultivating rice thousands of years ago, but it wasn’t the Chinese who brought rice to Guyana.

In 1738, Laurens Storm van Gravesande, Dutch Governor of Essequibo, brought rice to feed the enslaved Africans working on the sugar estates.

When indentured labourers arrived from India under British rule, demand for rice shot up.

Over time, rice cultivation increased to the point where, in 1896, Guyana, then British Guiana, exported rice to Trinidad. Today, we export rice to the West Indies, to Latin American countries and, I’ve heard, Portugal.

Keep buying, keep buying our rice, you lovely people. After the oil which Exxon is drilling from our shores has run out, we will depend on rice…and coconut oil…to help us to keep our economy glued tight and strong.

Ha! Have you noticed that I’ve said “glued” twice? Can you guess why? Have fun with that.

I’d better hop off to plan today’s meals and go for a walk and plot and scheme against two teef…two bandits, vagabonds, rogues…that’s a story for another day.

See you two Sundays from now. Remember to take good care of you! Eat nice food an’ dance-up li’l bit. Plenty luuuuve, neena.