Jamaican Versions of Callaloo

The history of callaloo across the Caribbean is appropriately confused and complicated, not only in terminology and etymology, but also in culinary process and metaphorical weight. The Jamaican drift over the long term has been toward a simplification, applying callaloo strictly to the plant Amaranthus viridis and its steamed dish. Mention callaloo to Jamaican people and they will think first of the green leafy plant or a bundle of stalks loosely tied together or perhaps a scoop of cooked vegetable. Only with encouragement will a few recognize callaloo as also the name for a thick soup of the style indicated by the title of the literary journal Callaloo. The Jamaican understanding is in this way quite strongly differentiated from the usage of the eastern Caribbean. It is a difference of long standing. Further, although callaloo is the most popular green leafy vegetable of Jamaica, it carries little symbolic or metaphorical meaning. It does not serve as a version of the model that has become so strong in the Trinidadian identification of callaloo with multiculturalism and Creole society (Munasinghe 22). Similarly, Jamaican callaloo has a relatively minor symbolic role in popular culture, literature, and art, partly because it lacks this social model and partly because the plant and the dish lack the aesthetic appeal of other iconic Jamaican foods, such as the colour, form, aroma, and taste of ackee or star apple.

In the twentieth century, Jamaicans read about callaloo as a strange food of the eastern Caribbean. For example, readers of the Gleaner, Jamaica's longest-running newspaper founded at the abolition of slavery, were told in 1912 that travelers to Trinidad would not only find the meal times odd but also "taste some strange and savoury dishes," including "callalloo soup, a mixture of crabs and slimy tropical vegetable called okra, stewed lapp, a wild pig, and wild turkeys" (Lowater 13). Similarly, in 1938 the Gleaner explained that one of the "native delicacies" of Trinidad was "callaloo, a green soup made with tannia leaves and ochras, in which is boiled a land crab" ("Oysters" 29). In Grenada, "callaloo soup" might go with "a nice fat agouti or manicou" (Redhead 5). The movement towards Federation produced more positive references, and recipes for the Trinidad variety of callaloo appeared among lists of characteristic "West Indian Dishes" ("West Indian Dishes" 8). By the late 1960s, a "West Indian Night" might include amongst its entertainment the opportunity to "enjoy the pepper pot and black pudding of Guyana, the pillou and callaloo of Trinidad, the flying fish and coo coo of Barbados, together with your favourite Jamaican dishes" (Advertisement 1967, 7). But Jamaicans had to be told that the green leafy vegetables included in these versions of "callaloo" came from plants quite unrelated to Jamaican callaloo (Hawkes, "Calalu" 29).

The Dictionary of Jamaican English prepared by Cassidy and Le Page in the 1960s used "calalu" as its preferred spelling and traced the word to the calalú of Latin American Spanish, meaning "a rich soup or stew in which one or more kinds of calalu leaves are the chief ingredients," but identified the primary meaning of the word in Jamaican English as "The name given to several plants having edible leaves, eaten as greens, in soups, medicinally, etc." Occasionally, the word, and the plant, has been thought African, and it indeed may be, by feedback (de Lisser "Random Jottings" 1937, 12; Sealy 10). The second meaning given by Cassidy and Le Page was "A thick soup (the usual Sp Amer meaning)," but they added that in Jamaica this was generally called "calalu soup." Their third meaning came from "recent use" particularly "among the folk" of Jamaica, in which "the word is further generalized to include any leaves eaten as greens."

Callaloo or Calalu?

The spelling of callaloo proved a preoccupation of a kind. The Dictionary of Jamaican English offered the following variants to its preferred calalu: "culilu" (with citations from 1696 and 1707), "caliloo" (1748), "calaloe" and "caleloe" (1756), "calaloo" (1756, 1835), "colalue" (1774), "calalue" (1774, 1814), "colilu" (1811), "calalu" (1814), "callalu" (1835, 1948), "calulu" (1913), and "callalloo" (1946). The spelling used here—"callaloo"—was...