The Soup That Nobody Would Taste

Every cook has an origin story. Mine starts with an empty pot and a six-year-old with far too much confidence.

Summers in Hamilton Mountain meant watching my grand-aunt work her outdoor kitchen like a conductor. Fire going, pot singing, provisions lined up like they had appointments. I watched that woman the way other children watched television. And at some point, in the way of six-year-olds everywhere, I decided that watching was the same as knowing.

So I would gather my supplies. A pot. Whatever provisions I could liberate. Some seasoning I had no business touching. And I would march myself down the road to my cousin Nadine's house, chest out, ready to cook soup for everybody, exactly like grand-aunt made. A whole little chef, self-appointed.

Here is what I could never understand at the time. Somehow, by the time I reached the yard, everybody was gone. My big cousins would scatter like roaches when the light comes on. Children who had been loud in the yard two minutes before were suddenly nowhere on this earth. I would stand there with my pot, calling names, and get back only breeze. Every time. I just wanted somebody to taste my soup. Nobody ever would.

I want it on the record that they were probably right. I have no idea what was in those pots. Neither did the pots.

But a child's feelings don't know anything about seasoning, and mine got hurt. So I gave it up. For years I did not cook a thing, right through school, right through leaving Jamaica at fifteen for America, right up until the day I got my first apartment and realized that food does not arrive by itself. Grown life has a way of reintroducing you to old dreams.

So I did what Jamaican daughters everywhere do. I called my mother. Not once. For every step, of every dish, every time. How much water for the rice. When to turn the chicken. What "season it up good" actually means in measurable units, which, if you ask any Jamaican mother, it does not. Those phone calls were my real cooking school, the same school my mother went to under her own mother, just with worse reception.

And then one day it clicked. Seasoning is not a recipe, it is a language. Once I understood what the thyme was doing, what the pimento wanted, why the scallion goes in when it goes in, I could cook anything. Not just Jamaican food. Italian, Indian, Thai. Every cuisine on earth is just a different accent of the same conversation between heat and seasoning, and I grew up hearing it spoken fluently by women who never once wrote it down.

These days people ask me to cook. They stay in the kitchen when I do it. Nobody scatters. Sometimes I think about that little girl marching down the road with her pot, looking for one person who would trust her, and I wish I could tell her: it is in you already. It was always in you. It came down from your grand-aunt through your mother like a river finding its way downhill. You were destined to cook like the women before you.

Nadine, wherever you are: the soup is ready now. You can come out.