My First Soup and Dumpling

Its really amazing to see where life would take you. When I was young growing up in Turks and Caicos, I always wondered where I would end up. Well now at the age of 26 going on 27 I am here in England working as a trained Chef. I had an opportunity in my Food Writing class to share with a few people my experiences growing up in at home and as the class was Food writing, the paper I wrote was centered around food. To this day I am rather thankful for the experiences because it made me appreciate food and enjoy it more than I ever have before..
With that being said, here  is my paper as it was written in my Food Writing Class: My first Soup and Dumpling

Whenever you start a meal, it is always started with soup, if not then it the appetizer or salad in that order or vice versa. In Turks and Caicos, especially on the island where I grew up, soup was always an entrée. That being said traditionally there is only one main course to a meal.

I grew up with my grandmother who was the reason for my existence.  It was through her that I learnt to cook, mostly because I was forced in front of the fire place. The town I grew up in was called Conch Bar which was the capital of the largest inhabited island Middle Caicos. The island got its name because of the large conch which was found mostly in that area. The house in which I lived in was pretty big, five bedrooms and two kitchens. One kitchen was inside of the house which was commonly used at night or during bad weather as my grandmother used to say and then there was the wooden kitchen. This kitchen is where I did most of my cooking. It was basically a shed attached to the house and instead of a gas stove there was a fire hearth or “fire half” as it was called where we used wood or coal to do most of the cooking and some baking. The fire hearth was made from an old galvanized tub filled with dirt and over a period of time the ashes created a comfortable resting place for the wood.  Anyone from the islands can tell you that food cooked with this source of heat was the best tasting food ever.

 I will never forget my introduction to the world of island food in which my grandmother was the instructor and what an instructor she was. My grandmother farmed her own crops which included sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, corn, bean, black eyes peas, sugar cane and many other different vegetables. We also had fruits such as sugar bananas, sugar apple, sapodilla, sour sop, West Indian cherries, American cherries and numerous other fruits.

The day my grandmother told me that I was going to cook dinner, was the day my interest in food began to grow. For dinner that day she decided to cook soup, crab soup and dumplings which happened to be one of my all time favorite soups. It is comprised of land crab with conch, salt pork tail or pork face, beans – lots of it, sweet potatoes, sweet ripe plantains and dumplings.  Lets just call this soup a very hearty one. The crabs are a very important ingredient for this soup as it gives the soup its special flavor. We go hunting for the crabs at night or at times during the day when my grandmothers take us into her little plot of land called her “field”. This is her garden, where she grows her vegetables. Some days we would go willingly other days after a good swatting with a broom stick or whatever my grandmother could get her hands on we would be off grumbling with our lips almost down to the ground.  The crabs were just about valued as gold. They were diligently sought out, sold, traded and kept as prized possessions.  During the summer months when there is rain and thunder and even when there is perfect weather, the crabs were picked up along the deserted airport runway, bagged or bucketed and thrown into coops or cages made of wood or tightly woven wire.  Cleaning the crabs would usually be a bit of a hassle because they fought with vigilance, waving their claws like and snapping their sharp pincers like Indian belly dancers clapping their little hand cymbals. They were scrubbed and disassembled like Lego blocks, pincers, legs and other body parts.

The trip into the fields would result in us returning home with a basket loaded with sweet potatoes, beans and other earthen goodies, fresh from the ground which was carefully balanced on my grandmother’s head while she was walking with her hands at her side. I was transformed into a beast of burden carrying a huge bundle of wood for cooking. It didn’t matter what type of wood it was, as a matter of fact she really didn’t pay much attention to what type of wood I got as long as I got a decent size bundle to take home. My poor neck, it hurt at times that I often tossed the bundle of wood from my head only to shatter the bundle and how to tie it all over again.

At home my cooking lessons got underway. First I was instructed to beat the conch and beat it I did.  I took out my anger on it from all the work I had to do in the field while grumbling how I couldn’t wait to get out on my own. The pork tails or pork faces were cut into bite size pieces and sometimes about a quarter of the meat is disappearing into my mouth rather than in the pot.

 With the fire lit in the fire hearth and the big fire pot was placed on the three stones which were placed in a triangular shape and served as support for the pot. My grandmother used lard, which I at one time thought it was some sort of whipped cream; vegetable oil or Crisco was the next choice.  Many a times I got singed from the flames but in time I got used to it.  It was tough being a student at the age of 10, especially when I could hear my friend playing or making plans to go swimming. Standing in front of my grandmother was a sure way of her monitoring your performance which can lead to clouts behind the head or a solid slap to my shoulder and even the pot spoon was turned into paraphernalia for “cutting tail” a term so dearly used by many parents in the islands. The pieces of crab were then added to the hot oil which turned them white from the searing heat.

The beans which were grown in our fields were boiled the day before or even weeks before but were stored in freezer bags or plastic containers frozen solid, were added to the soup to lend its rich brownish red color. The salted pork tails which have been boiled to remove some of the saltiness were also added which also added to the great flavor of this soup. Water and other seasonings were added and we kneaded dumplings whilst we waited for the water to boil.

The dumplings were another interesting aspect of the soup. My grandmother made dumplings that were firm and had a lovely bite to them. It was basically flour, water and sugar. Of course there was no leavening agent because she preferred it that way, dumb. My aunts often use baking powder in their dumplings and I was always amazed at how poofy they were. One bite of the dumplings reminded of marshmallows but definitely not as soft as marshmallows. Whenever I bit into them, I could almost hear a little sigh coming from the dumplings.

It is amazing the way this soup turns out. I have eaten the same type of coup from several different persons and they all just taste different even though the same ingredients were used. Last year I was visiting with friends from Turks and Caicos who attend school here in Rhode Island. We got to talking about home food and how we missed it. I boasted of how I always cooked peas and rice which is a local favorite in the islands but haven’t had much soup.

I always look back on those days when we cooked food using the wood and I must admit that the food had a much better flavor than when it was cooked on the stove.  The smoke, the loud searing sound of the food as they were immersed in the hot searing oil. I guess the hard work in preparing such a meal and going through the motions of harvesting the ingredients really made me appreciate the food much more. I miss those days and sadly that house where I learnt how to cook, the kitchen it all went up in flames during the Christmas of 1998.