Perfecting Habit: Guyana Callaloo and the Migration of "Poor People's Food," An Interview with Evelyn London

This interview was conducted July 27, 2006, via telephone between College Station, Texas, and Bloomfield, New Jersey.

JACKSON: I'll start with this "Callaloo Jumble" recipe in the Guyana cookbook.¹ I remember that on Fridays, you used to make hamburgers for the kids and for the adults, you made salt fish with spinach and sometimes that nasty caryla.² [Laughter] I wondered if your saltfish and spinach recipe was a variation of this callaloo recipe.

LONDON: I saw that recipe, but that is something different.³ On Fridays in Guyana and even here [New Jersey] we never went to the market to purchase things to cook. We used whatever was available at home. Also, on Fridays, during Lent and out of habit, I wouldn't cook meat but a lot of fish, either fresh or salted. Saturdays and Sundays were the big days for cooking.

JACKSON: And shopping?

LONDON: Yes. You shopped on Saturday and so you would have a nice meat for Saturday and a nice meat for Sunday. And the rest of the week you buy, you know, whatever you could afford. Fridays is always like cook up rice and some greens and some shrimp or codfish or whatever you've got. Sometimes we didn't even eat meat, we'd eat porridge. Usually, at the end of the week you have leftover scraps and you use that. There wasn't a real recipe. You just cooked whatever you had money to buy. Sometimes you just had money to buy some salt fish and some callaloo and that's what you use for that day. It was poor people's food.

JACKSON: When would this have been?

LONDON: Well, when I was growing up. That's what my mom used to cook.

JACKSON: What was her job?

LONDON: She worked with people doing washing: washing and ironing clothes.

JACKSON: Were a lot of people like her in terms of their employment?

LONDON: Yes, that's what they had to do, you know? You had children, you had to be home to look after them, and so, that was the easiest thing. You go and pick up the clothes on Monday and wash them and have them back by Thursday or Friday.

JACKSON: And this was well before Independence?

LONDON: Yes, yes, yes. That was long before Burnham came into power.⁴

JACKSON: So when did you start to keep your household?

LONDON: When I got married in 1963.

JACKSON: And were things any better then?

LONDON: Well, I only lived in Georgetown, Guyana, for one year after I was married. I went to live in the Rupununi in 1964 and stayed there until 1966 when I came to the [United] States. That time was good for me because, you know, in the Rupununi you had the means to eat whatever you want.⁵

JACKSON: So things were better, economically, for you in the Rupununi.

LONDON: Yes, for me because it was a meat place. They used to slaughter the meat that would be sent to other places inside and outside of Guyana. You had all the ranchers, like the Melvilles, and others. They used to slaughter in the night, from about midnight to four or five o'clock in the morning and then they would take the meat to Georgetown or Trinidad or wherever. And if something happened and the plane couldn't come, then the meat had to be given away because there was no wide scale refrigeration. Only those who could afford to, and the hospital, had fridges or freezers.⁶

JACKSON: What about other people who lived there, the aboriginal inhabitants?

LONDON: Well, the Amerindians would fish and they would eat a lot of meat or they would catch a lot of wild meat, but they were poor, too. They would eat whatever they had. When they had meat, they would "tasso" it. When that meat was given away by the ranchers, the Amerindians took it and then they would spend all night salting it and...