03/09/2025
Would you be interested in joining a Caribbean cookbook club?
If you were lucky enough to have a mother like mine, your childhood was spent in the kitchen, testing — sometimes too eagerly — the sweetness of cake batter or the pepperiness of seasoned meats.
Ours was a canary yellow cookbook with a plastic, black and spiral binding. The pages were dusted with flour, which I could feel when my finger skimmed the ingredients. In the margins of recipes were my mother’s notes of how we tweaked recipes to our liking. From my recollection, this was the only cookbook we used. Our bible.
Now that I’m a mom, I’ve searched for cookbooks that carry that same magic — recipes that feel personal, rooted and worth returning to again and again. I’ve found this in Kwéyòl / Creole: Recipes, Stories, and Tings from a St. Lucian Chef’s Journey by Nina Compton and Osayi Endolyn . Go to the link in the bio for Rochelle Oliver’s personal essay and for the full cookbook review.
