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Leading author, journalist and commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talks about her
much-admired The Settler's Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food at the
Museum of London Docklands at 6.30pm on Friday 28 January 2011.
The memoir contains Idi Amin’s favourite stew recipe- Exeter Stew- given to me by
Sussanah, one of his mistresses and a fellow student who was killed when he tired of
her. And descriptions of fried balls of spicy mashed potato which hid diamonds,
cooked up by fleeing Ugandan Asians and the Victoria sponges, light as kites we
were taught in school, soft colonial diplomacy or taste washing?
We landed here and started up 24 hour cornershops which made many very rich.
Food became our passport, survival, route to wealth and influence.
The book is also a lament for my mother, whose death four years has left me with a
cavernous hollow. I turn to food to make her live again, the tender and feisty,
sometimes impossible woman. When I cook her coconut dhal the smell of her in her
cooking cardigan, enters the kitchen, sniffs to check it is as it should be.
For Proust too food becomes the mystical medium, reuniting us with those on the
other side:’ when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the
destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more persistent, more faithful,
smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls remembering, waiting, hoping upon
the ruins of all the rest’. Prayers at gravesides or assiduous history books cannot
warm up the past and make it stir again. Food memoirs can, more vividly than
dreams and fictional time machines.
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ents/EveningEvents.htm