Long-Distance Haitian Cooking
By Myriam J. A. Chancy
Marinades, Haiti’s savory version of funnel cakes or small, fried dumplings, became a Christmas tradition in the family. Photo © Wilbert Chancy.
Madame Péan was a good-hearted, thick-built woman the color of roasted chestnuts, with substantial eyebrows and a ready smile. She was the mother of the only other Haitian family we knew of in Winnipeg, Manitoba, when my parents moved to the prairie provinces in the mid-1970s, moving there for teaching positions in the French quarter. Mr. Péan was a former judge who had had to flee Port-au-Prince under the Duvalier régime. If Mme. Péan had had a job outside of the household before agreeing to take her three daughters to the deep-cold Canadian prairies, I did not know. All I knew is that their youngest daughter had the same name I did, and that Mme. Péan was the best Haitian cook around.
Dinners at the Péans’ were sprawling affairs with multiple dishes from riz collé to chicken in sauce, to beef-filled pâté in a flaky brown crust, to the occasional pois en sauce, a rich kidney bean souplike dish, which was my mother’s favorite, served with white rice on the side. (The ongoing debate among Haitians is whether pois en sauce is served best over the rice or on the side, like a pond interrupting the flow of traffic in Central Park.)
The best part of the meal, if your stomach hadn’t burst by then, was dessert, which varied from pain patate (a cobbler like dessert made from white sweet potatoes that resembles American bread pudding), to a rich, golden cake made in a crown mold, to pineapple upside-down rum cake.
I remember these meals well not only because the Péans were the only other Haitian family in town, but because they would take me back to the hearths of my grandmother and my mother’s oldest sister, where my mother had been living when my father had set out for Canada ahead of us, birthing me in Port-au-Prince, then bringing me back to her sister’s house until she could set forth to Canada herself.
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My aunt had married, under cloudy circumstances, at the age of 16, and had a number of children in close succession, while my mother had stayed in school to become an accountant, then taken a law degree, though she never practiced. Their mother was a seamstress; her grandmother, whose house they all lived in (my grandmother, my mother, and her three siblings), a market-woman.
Strangely, my two uncles learned to cook, or were taught, as was my aunt, but my mother never did, except out of necessity. My father, in fact, did most of the cooking. He experimented with Spam (a childhood delicacy on the island), made spaghetti with ketchup and once sent us to school with pastrami sandwiches and told us, as a joke, that we were eating horsemeat, which, of course, I proudly recounted to schoolmates leaving French Canadians bewildered as to what Haitians could possibly be eating at home.
Looking back, I realize that my parents were trying to cook Canadian without knowing what that might be, leaving Haitian meals for special occasions. Once, back in Haiti, my aunt had a North American sugary cereal bought in advance of our return and when the box was opened, the puffed rice crawled with fat red ants.
“Well,” someone in the kitchen declared, “those ants have a lot of protein.”
North American fare went out the window immediately.
In my grandmother’s and aunt’s house, the staples varied: stewed chicken; mirlitons stuffed with shrimp or crab; large avocados with yellow flesh; cod stewed with caramelized onions; riz djon-djon – a black rice that got its color from the juice of mountain mushrooms, and from which small black stones had to be picked out by hand before cooking; beet salad mixed with salmon, cooked peas and carrots, aka “Russian salad,” attributed to the Poles who had defected from the French during the Revolution; macaroni au gratin; griot (cubed and grilled pork shoulder, marinated in bitter orange and piment), in addition to versions of cod and chicken. Both made desserts that would leave diners begging for small cups of coffee to wake the dead.
I was content to roll up from the table and take a seat somewhere at an elder’s feet and listen to the stories they would tell. It did not occur to me, then, that these feasts were glorious because they were not everyday meals but spreads for us, the returnees, designed to keep us in the embrace of these women who knew they would have to let us go again, as mothers do and always have, in lands where choices are few and leaving is the option most would take if they could.
I have a distinct memory of going straight to my grandmother’s home on Rue Rigaud from the airport in the late 1970s, to find her with her apron tied about her waist, cooking our welcome dinner in her cramped kitchen, which was feet away from my grandfather’s mortuary (he was an undertaker). Love and death coalesced. We were alive, her cooking declared. It would always taste of welcome, of family, of her two hands pressing the doughs, whisking the milk and eggs, tasting the sauces, adjusting the spices to just-so, so that our welcome home would be unreserved.
These were the days when the families were still whole, extended, remaining in Haiti, despite dictatorship, staying in their lanes as undertakers or entrepreneurs (no one knew exactly what my aunt’s husband did for a living); as flight attendants like most of my aunts on my father’s side; or musicians like my father’s brothers. My grandmother’s and aunt’s dining tables brought us back together, especially once the move to Canada became definitive and return to Haiti became not only a dream but an impossibility.
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When I was 14, for some reason I no longer remember, I made an unusual request: I asked that we celebrate the holidays with Haitian staples. My father was game. The challenge was that he had never written down a recipe in his life and the recipes in Haiti’s “national cookbook,” Niniche’s Recettes Simples De Cuisine Haïtienne (my mother owned a tattered copy of the 1966 third edition), though full of local lore were remarkably inaccurate. What could we do beyond the usual rice, pois en sauce and stewed chicken?
My father remembered a recipe for marinades, Haiti’s savory version of funnel cakes or small, fried dumplings, and we set to making them in our Canadian kitchen, overlooking a yard filled with snowdrifts and willow saplings that my father had planted. We tried several versions until my father declared that we had achieved perfection: golden, pillowy puffed-up concoctions of flavored dough his grandmother had taught him to make at age 8, when he had learned to cook, including how to build a fire.
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Every holiday I can remember since then has been filled with Haitian staples, with my father as head cook, especially when my parents would come, like snowbirds, to spend winter holidays with me in the relatively warmer U.S. clime. We had our last Haitian holiday feast, making those same marinades, in the winter of 2018, just weeks before the turn of the new year. My mother would pass shortly after, five days into January. How would we celebrate in the future?
The following year, we did nothing as a family, the absence too fresh, too painful, but in 2020, under stay-at-home-orders, my spouse and I thought of my father, alone in Canada and proposed that he teach us a Haitian dish online. At first, he dismissed the idea, but, as the days grew closer to the end of the year, I received photos of his trial runs on WhatsApp with notes about the recipe he was putting together “in case we still wanted to try.” That is how we found ourselves huddled over a smart phone, talking to my father on a video call as he walked us through the recipe. Since he could not be present to make the mix, he offered, for the first time, measurements, in French:
Mix well a cup of flour (we used oat) with a tablespoon of baking powder, a tablespoon of white wine vinegar (we used rice vinegar), three minced cloves of garlic, two minced shallots. Add salt, pepper, coriander, cloves, tabasco, to taste. Add water and blend until the batter is smooth. Fold in two egg whites beaten to stiff peaks and a tablespoon of oil. Bring a cup of vegetable oil to medium high heat in a saucepan. Use a ladle to drop batter into the oil until bubbles form on the surface and the edges brown (two to three minutes). Flip the marinades over to cook on the other side (another two to three minutes). Remove and set on paper towels to absorb excess oil. Serve with mayonnaise. Eat while hot.
My father, who had premade his batch, watched on as we followed instructions, made a mess, in short, had fun. My mother was not there but, for a brief moment, while we shared our marinades across a border while recalling Haïti, it was as if we were sitting back at Mme. Péan’s dining table, dreaming of home, or further back than that, sitting in the kitchens of our grandmothers, as if we had never left.