Marie Mitchell says so much of the beauty of Caribbean cuisine invites cooks to slow down

Marie Mitchell's cooking journey didn't begin in earnest until her 30th birthday. Her epiphany was born out of a desire to understand herself and her heritage. Living in London with Caribbean roots, Marie's search for connection taught her to shift perceptions, to transcend complicated legacies, to find the positive in personal experience. She has translated those experiences into a cookbook, Kin: Caribbean Recipes for a Modern Kitchen.

Evan Kleiman: At a young age, your parents, who were both eight years old at the time, moved from Jamaica to England where you were raised. Can you explain the Windrush Generation for those of us here in the US who aren't so familiar with it?

Marie Mitchell: Yeah, it was a period of time where the post-war, essentially, that people were called upon was that the mother country, Britain needed to rebuild. I think it obviously wasn't necessarily spun exactly like that but it meant that lots of people in the Caribbean were essentially called upon to move to the UK to try and build up workforces that had obviously been depleted. So a lot of people came here that then became nurses, bus drivers, bin collectors, just really essentially workers and helping to rebuild an economy and a place that had, obviously, had so much. 

You had this massive movement of people out of the Caribbean, away from places, taking a lot of people that had skills that weren't necessarily being utilized in the UK, but then had kind of left a deficit in the Caribbean. So that's what it was. It was this real absolute movement and migration of people to the UK to essentially fill a gap here in terms of work, and then kind of bringing that energy and culture here, but it really was quite an abrasive time because they weren't welcomed, and that's the thing that was so devastating. 

When the Windrush scandal happened here, which was all about the fact that these people had moved and people that had children and then didn't necessarily have the right to actually be here, then many people were sent back to a place in the Caribbean, it was horrendous. It still hasn't really been properly dealt with. The consequence of that is that people made their lives here, but then still didn't have this real sense, or felt as if they did. The reality was they weren't actually respected as people and their contributions either.

A Colombo chicken curry can easily be made vegetarian or vegan and it can be adapted into a soup. Photo by Christian Cassiel.

Oh, awful. So in this situation where you were born in the UK, your parents had emigrated at such a young age, how did you experience your culinary heritage through meals at home?

I was a horrendously fussy child. I didn't eat. I had pizza without sauce and had it with tomato ketchup. It was that bad. I had very few things that I used to absolutely love but one of them would always be a fried dumpling. I adore plantain but what I kind of soaked in through osmosis, through parties, weddings, birthday parties, everything. 

It was this real, rich cultural heritage, and though at the time, I wasn't really engaging in it in a conscious way, unconsciously, I very much was so when I went to university, I think that was the first time where I suddenly felt as if I really wanted to understand and engage in my cultural heritage but through food. 

I remember my mum coming up to visit me. I was like, "Can we make rice and peas and chicken?" We did it, and we had some friends over. I think that was the beginning of a shift where I didn't necessarily want it to be about always my mum and dad having to cook these things for me. I wanted to understand how to create them myself and share that with people I love, which is so much about Caribbean culture and food particularly.

Tell me about Pop's Kitchen. I'd love to know how it got off the ground and eventually leading to Nyamming, your Caribbean pop-up with your parents. 

Pop's Kitchen was born because at the time, supper clubs were becoming a bit of a thing, and they were really exciting. I very much was just discovering them through the internet. I hadn't actually been to one. So in my head, I thought, you know what? I really want to do something with food. Let me just start one. So I did. 

I had a friend who had a cafe, and he said I could use his space in the evening. I remember asking my dad, being like, "If I do this, would you help me cook?" And he said, "Of course." My mum naturally then wanted to be involved, so she used to help host. 

Pretty much born out of my flat in Hackney, which is in East London, I sort of cooked or prepped things the night before. I was very emotionally crying into the ice cream, being like, what am I doing? And just sort of embarked on this slightly crazy journey because of the fact that I'd never had cooked in a professional context, and had never even experienced kind of the way in which the dynamic of a supper club was, but just sort of felt as if it was something that suited me in it. And it absolutely was. It was so much fun because it was a chance to experiment and figure out my cooking style. 

But also, I lost my brother when I was 23 and this was the first time since he'd passed where I felt as if my mum and my dad and I had come together as a family and felt like a unit again, which was really beautiful. Then I noticed that someone had started following me on Instagram. There was this rum pop-up that had started following me, and we started collaborating together. So they were doing rum pop-ups, I was doing the food and we recognized that we were all in search of something similar as second, third-generation Caribbean, British Caribbean people. 

We wanted a greater connection to our cultural heritage, so we started doing collaborative supper clubs, and that led to our starting a business called Island Social Club. When we had that, that's when we started doing the Nyamming Supper Club series, which was incredible, because then we started collaborating with other chefs, trying to eke out the stories that connected us to other places, thinking about the wider context of Pan Africanism, then specifically drawing on those different influences and understanding the connections that we have, and those bonds and lines that maybe haven't been unearthed in as much detail, or they hadn't, maybe at the time, or we hadn't, personally.

Marie Mitchell explored her Caribbean heritage by starting a pop-up with her parents in London. "I'm obsessed with legacy and the traces of life that we inherit," she says. Photo by Christian Cassiel.

Let's talk about the food, specifically. What is the role of time in Caribbean cooking? Beans soaking, marinades working their magic. I really noticed as I was looking through the book that we were required to build that time in.

Yeah, I think you can absolutely create meals that don't necessarily require you to do long marinations or to soak things. There's always a way in which you can speed it up. There are some recipes that you don't even need, they're just done for you. But I also feel what's so beautiful about this process of taking time is that it naturally causes us to slow down. I've had it before, and we had a residence, a restaurant residency, pop-up, where once we were running out of a curry, and I prepped some more and started earlier in the day with the view of that being for the next day's menu, but actually, we were so busy that we needed it that evening. My business partner at the time, Joseph, said, "Let's just get it out." And I said, "No, it still needs more time."

I think there's so much beauty in that that we've lost a bit because of the fact that we're all so busy, but we can all absolutely do with slowing down and taking our time, and whether that's taking time to understand the culture, to read about it, to soak in the stories, whether that's taking the time to toast your spices and create the spice mixes, because the depth of flavor that you'll have in that dish will be so much greater, or it's the process of starting the night before, and really creating these processes so that then when you when you have this final product, it's like this gift that you're giving yourself, that you're giving to other people. I think that's the feature that is in the cuisine, but also, I think is kind of an energy that exists in the culture as well.

Given that, let's talk about a dish that takes some time. What is your preferred bean to cook in a traditional rice and peas recipe?

A dookie. That's my preference. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else using a dookie bean.

Why is that? Why do you prefer them? 

That was always what my mum and dad used. For me, I thought that that was what everyone used. I think the first time I had rice and peas, it wouldn't have been the first time, because I think my nan used to use kidney beans. In fact, she did. But I think maybe the more I started exploring Caribbean food outside of the home and outside of family, I recognized that actually this was more the exception, not the norm. 

My dad, I did eventually ask him, and he just said he preferred the taste of them. He liked smaller beans and he liked the color. Whatever you use will kind of give you that sort of reddish brown but I suppose you'll normally get more of a tree. Small, brown, whereas with the dookie beans, you do sort of get this reddish tinge, which is really beautiful. It reminds me of a bit of an art if you were to sprinkle some of that in. So for me, that's become something that is traditional in the wider sense of Jamaican culture, because it's a Jamaican dish, it's also a Mitchell family dish now, because we use a particular bean. 

Can you talk about the role of snacks in the Jamaican cannon of cooking? Do you have a favorite patty or a bite that tastes like nostalgia to you?

I think I always associate, for me, my favorite being a chicken patty. I've never known anyone else to love the chicken as much. It's always kind of salt fish or the traditional beef. I just absolutely, for me, that bite is the chicken. But for me, it's really about the pastry. That's what I'm in it for, that crumbly, short pastry that's got that butteriness. My favorite thing is all those crumbs that collect in the bottom of a paper bag, and then me eating at the end. That's just like the chef's kiss for me.

In her debut cookbook "Kin," Marie Mitchell transcends complicated legacies and finds the positive in personal experience. Photo courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.

One of my favorite parts of the book are the sauces, rubs, and marinades. What is a recipe that you would suggest that a listener could make for dinner using one of those sauces, rubs, or marinades?

I would say, because it's one of my favorite curries, make the Colombo mix and the top spice then make the Colombo chicken curry. You can also, if you're a vegetarian or vegan, absolutely swap out the chicken for seasonal veg. I often do different squashes depending on the time of the year. What is really great about it is, if you want to, you can almost turn it into a soup. So just make the broth and use the butternut squash, which is what I use in it. But you could also use anything else. Let that cook down. That can become this really rich, silky soup. 

You can then also have these other bits and pieces in it, or you make the curry, and that is just a really great entry level dish but really delivers on flavor and is quite, apart from marinating the chicken overnight, which I know sometimes people don't want to have to think ahead. But, you know, we kind of talk about things like food preparation to allow us to have more time with our food without it taking over entire evenings. That's exactly the same with marination and that means the next day, you can come in, chop your veg, seal your meat, nestle everything in a pot, then 45 minutes later, an hour, you've got a really delicious dish that actually most of the time, once you've done the initial part, you get to walk away and then come and have a really delicious dish.