When Life Gives You Corn Soup
art by Gina Ledor
Winter means my Mimi's corn soup. An earthy dish of carrots, corn, sweet potatoes, mushy plantains, and piping hot chicken, swimming in a coconut milk base that makes your mouth water. It is better than school snow days, steaming hot chocolate, and I would say it is better than Christmas — but I also eat some of Mimi's food then. Sometimes, Mimi will use cornmeal and flour to roll out a Caribbean dumpling called "Spinners and Sinkers." The white dumpling looks almost like a chubby finger, but it's delicious. Dense enough you can see the bite mark you left behind, and it soaks up the soup flavor beautifully.
My grandmother, Mimi, left her native country of Guyana when she was 26 years old. At almost nine months pregnant with my mother, she left "the land of many waters" and took an airplane 2,600 miles away, to New York.
Quickly, her Caribbean accent started to fade (although you can still hear a sweet tang in her voice); she stocked up on coats for chilly New York winters and became accustomed to the fast pace life of her new town. Lasagna from Tony Di Napoli's, fried pork, red beans, & yellow rice from the Spanish bodega on 33rd street, and Chinese take-out chicken & broccoli were quickly added to her list of comfort foods. But one thing that never changed was her love of Guyanese cuisine.
"It's the last vestige of culture that people shed," said Jennifer Berg, director of graduate food studies at New York University. When you immigrate from one country to another, you will lose certain aspects of your maternal culture right away. You change how you dress so you can blend into mainstream culture, adopt new vocabulary, and practice different traditions. But food is different. Berg continued, "With food, it's something you're engaging in hopefully three times a day, so there are more opportunities to connect to memory and family and place. It's the hardest to give up."
After marrying my grandfather and having several children, Mimi blended the West Indian cuisine she grew up with, traditional American meals, and Black Southern soul food to create dishes for her family. My mom has adopted similarly diverse cooking skills.
When I asked Mimi if she taught my mom how to cook, she laughed. "No, she learned from Food Network." But my mom admits that she looks to Mimi's guidance when she makes savory Guyanese dishes now and then.
In the months since lockdown, like many of us, I have found myself in the kitchen more than usual. My family can usually hear me creeping up to the microwave at midnight to make M&M mug cakes. Smoothie bowls, cauliflower gnocchi — you name it, I've tried to make it. But I've never attempted to make Guyanese food, much less asked my mom or Mimi to teach me.
My family members know I can be quite the critic when it comes to food. Mimi and my mom often joke that they can't wait to be invited to my home when I'm grown so they can have one of my meals and give me a taste of my own medicine. They'll turn into Gordon Ramsey, I'm sure of it. I know I don’t always show my mom and Mimi how much I appreciate their food. But, in a year where there has been little comfort, I continue to find a safe space in their cooking time and time again.
I remember the summer afternoons, where Mimi would ask me to help her make roti, my favorite Guyanese dish — I'd hear her gold bangles clinking as she rolled out the dough and smile because I would soon have the buttery, flakey bread melting on my tongue. The car rides with my dad, where we would devour oxtails and rice from a small Guyanese shop near my dance studio. My mother's sorrel, a dark red, sour drink made from the sorrel plant's petals, always soothes my soul on Christmas day.
My mom’s comfort dish that Mimi cooks is provisions with stewed fish. Ground provisions is the term used by West Indian nations to describe traditional root vegetables such as sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, eddos, and dasheen root. When over five million enslaved Africans were taken to the Caribbean by English colonists to work on sugar plantations, the planters didn't want to spend much money feeding the enslaved people. So they gave them provision grounds, small tracts of the least desired land so that slaves could grow their survival food. Black women had to care for these provision grounds on top of their other grueling duties on the plantation. As writer Syreeta McFadden said, "The enslaved were never really meant to survive. But on the backs of Black women, they did."
Time and time again, Black women have shown that they can carry not only their families but the world on their shoulders. And Mimi and my mom do that in their very own kitchen.
One day, Mimi will cook roti, make cook-up rice, and boil a pot of corn soup for the last time. And I will make sure that her presence does not drip away completely. I'll make sure to learn how to cook that roti, mix cook-up rice, and make corn soup because everyone deserves to feel the love of Mimi at least once in their life. Everyone deserves to feel the love of Guyana, at least once in their life.