8054: Rekindling Haitian cooking traditions (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Tttnhm@aol.com

Keywords: cooking, cuisine, Liliane Nerette Louis, Miami


Woman rekindles Haitian cooking traditions among group
By Deborah S. Hartz 
Sun-Sentinel 
May 23 2001 
 
The women gather once a month at Liliane Nerette Louis’ home in Miami. 
There’s business-like Joanne Hyppolite of North Miami and her ex-roomate from 
college, Anita Turner of Pembroke Pines.

In a sling around Turner’s neck dangles 6-month-old Rebekah, who quietly 
watches the women cooking in between her stints of napping and nursing. 
Fabienne Josaphat of Miami is a late arrival who can’t stay long, but she 
dons an apron like the others and starts chopping.

This is a monthly cooking class. Louis uses it to teach these young Haitian 
and black women to cook and learn a little of their cultural traditions 
Dressed in a traditional Haitian dress with bright head scarf and yellow 
rings in her ears, Louis is using tonight’s class to teach the women to make 
legume, a common Haitian dish. Of course, legume means “vegetable," but here 
the variety of vegetables is rounded out with stewed beef and steamed blue 
crabs.

Louis is the author of When Night Falls, Kric!Krac! (Libraries Unlimited, 
1999), a book of Haitian folktales and recipes. She learned to cook as a 
child in Haiti, where she would watch her family’s cook prepare meals. At age 
5, she had her first experience with legume when she watched a neighbor make 
it for a family of six from a penny’s worth of salted meat.

Louis didn’t learn to make legume until many years later when, on a rainy 
day, her family’s cook didn’t show up to work. So Louis and her mother made 
legume to feed their family of 10.

“Although I am now living in the United States of America, my recipe for 
legume has not been metamorphosed. I am committed to preserving the Haitian 
culinary tradition just as it was in my youth,” she says in her heavy but 
lovely accent. It’s these traditions she’s passing along to the women in her 
class. Throughout the evening she peppers her cooking instructions with life 
lessons and cultural notes.

“I remember the platique or street vendor selling live crabs in the 
streets,” she tells us as she demonstrates how to clean those crabs. “He’d 
sell them early in the morning and you’d hear him sing about his crabs as he 
went by,” she adds, singing a few lines of his refrain in her sweet, sultry 
voice.

When showing the women how to pound parsley and garlic in a much-used wooden 
mortar and pestle, she explains that you don’t have to follow recipes 
exactly. “You have to taste and add as you go along. Writing about Haitian 
cooking is one thing, but you have to see it done to really understand that 
it takes taste and imagination,” Louis says.

She shows me how to taste a dish — Haitian-style. She hands me a spoonful of 
liquid and I sip it from the spoon. Oops, faux pas. In Haiti, she explains, 
they pour the liquid into the palm of the hand and lick it off the palm. I 
learn quickly as I see the other students tasting this way. As they hold 
their heads high and taste the fruits of their homeland, there’s a nobleness 
to it.

And then Louis explains that Haitian cooking is “fast and hot.” That’s 
because the peasants in the countryside cook over three hot stones with logs 
between them. They have no way to regulate the heat.

So when the rice cooks and sticks to the bottom of the pan, it’s called 
gratin and is considered a treat, not a problem.

“Haitians have to do with what they have,” she says.

While Louis talks, she keeps an eye on her students, who sit around her 
kitchen table cutting up onions, cabbage, carrots, peppers, eggplant and a 
variety of other vegetables. They work with what look like steak knives 
directly on the table surface. No fancy chef’s knives or butcher blocks here. 
And nothing goes to waste. Louis keeps a bag to hold the tough outer cabbage 
leaves, the ends of the onion and parsley stems. You’d think the end of the 
onion and parsley stems would go in the trash, but she’ll put them in the 
legume at the end.

In the background, you can hear the beef sizzling in its pot and smell the 
garlicky crabs as they steam. Louis takes a moment to talk about her 
31-year-old pans. “I don’t have fancy things,” she says. A look at her pot 
collection proves it. Even though the handles have fallen off, she refuses to 
replace those pots. There are a lot of memories cooked into each one. “My 
pots know me and I know my pots,” she says.

Louis then demonstrates how to peel and seed a chayote or mirliton squash. 
She quarters it and takes out the core like you would an apple. There’s a 
seed in the center of the core called the ke mirliton, or the heart of the 
mirliton. She says you can use it in your dish. Then she takes a knife and 
slices off the green outer skin from each quarter before cutting the squash 
into wedges.

Two and a half hours later, the legume is complete and a pot of Black 
Mushroom Haitian Rice, colored with tiny dried mushrooms called dyondyon, 
sits on the stove. We are ready to eat.

The women set the table with linen, silver and a candle. We remove the cork 
from a bottle of red wine. Louis pours it, turning her wrist so as not to get 
a drop on her tablecloth — a practiced skill, you can tell. Always practical, 
Louis adds sheets of newspaper and paper towels to the tablesetting. After 
all, this is finger food, for in among the vegetables and chunks of beef are 
the crabs. Crabs that have to be picked by hand and sucked to get out each 
succulent bit of meat. The paper will hold our empty shells.

She says grace and we eat. Serving up the rice, she comments, “In this 
country, rice is a little spoonful, but in Haiti, we eat a lot of rice, a big 
plateful.”

As we finish our last taste of rice and lick the crab juices from our 
fingers, Louis hands us warm, damp towels with a slice of lime. Finger 
cloths, a touch of French elegance from this woman who grew up in Haiti, a 
land once colonized by the French and a land where the upper class still 
speaks French.

Louis then regales us with the Haitian folktale of a man getting married who 
used a goat to try to buy his way to a higher station in life. I won’t 
divulge if he succeeded, but the name of the story is “Amen.” The perfect 
way to end this evening.

At least for the students. Louis still has to make red beans and rice for 50 
people to take to church tomorrow.

For a copy of When Night Falls, Kric!Krac!, by Liliane Nerette Louis, call 
800-237-6124. The book is $29 plus shipping. 


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