Maroon Magazine 2018_266

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June 2018 Charles Town Maroon International Conference Magazine Annette Brown the head cook for the Annual International Maroon Conference & Festival talks about Maroon food An interview with Flavius Laidley Good day Annette, how are you? Good day, I am well, thank you. Annette, are you from Charles Town? Yes I am from Charles Town and I have lived here all my life. What was Charles Town like when you were a child and what was it like growing up there? Being a child in Charles Town, it was very adventurous, back in the days you could have a nap in the middle of the street without being interfered by any vehicles. It was fun going into the farm to reap cane and other fruits in comparison to now. I would say growing up in Charles Town was very much adventurous. And I liked it! Tell us about your family I am coming from a small family, which I am grown with my grandparents from I was 3 months, they were both farmers and we were maintained through farming, they cultivate and sell whatever crops they produced. It was not upbringing like now, because we had to go to school by foot, sometimes barefooted, books in our hands, back then at the time in comparison to now. Sometimes it was real hard, knowing that you have to go to school and you get 1 hour lunch break, I would have to leave from school and go on the farm to have lunch especially on a day that they have Workings and then you would have to leave from there back to school and you cannot be late. We would have to do our chores in the mornings and you would have to be on time for school because if you are late you would get a whipping at school and another whipping when you get back home. I think growing up in that time helped us to be independent and reliable. Did your grandmother teach you to cook? Well actually, I learned a lot from my grandmother, she was that type of person, she was a kind of person who would cook nothing and you would enjoy it, from nothing she would make lovely soups and you go to bed with your belly full. Was this Maroon food? Most times it would be Maroon food, because back then being a poor family from a farming background, we would have a whole lot of vegetables and very rare we would have chicken on a Sunday, so most times we would have our “RunDunn” go to the river catch our “Jamga” and coconut and that’s it. So most time it would be Maroon Foods. Was food and eating an important part of your family life? Yes it was, because for the most part we were taught to eat healthy, and our foods should be well done, clean environment, so the whole cooking thing in the family was very important. 47
Charles Town Maroon International Conference Magazine June 2018 Now that you have your family what role does food play. It plays a major role, very major role, because it helps us to eat healthy. You know, now-a-day kids are more for the meats, but what I try to do, use the vegetables to counteract the meat, so we do not go all meat. Being from Charles Town, growing up in Charles Town and now living in Charles Town. What does it mean to you now to be cooking at the conference and festival and feeding visitors to your community? It’s a pleasure, and I would say that because for most of our tours, or should I say all tourists a pleasure hearing comments after being fed and for that reason it has always being a pleasure. I’ll go home in the evening and just wait to get a call saying lunch tour tomorrow, so I enjoy feeding persons form our Maroon kitchen and most importantly doing it to our best and getting some really good comments. What do you enjoy most about your participation in the annual international Charles Town Maroon Conference and festival? What I enjoy most is the whole fact of being here prepared, feeding hundreds or maybe thousands of people each year and knowing that everybody is being fed and everybody is comfortable having our meals. I’m here today and I got a meal and it was probably five different dishes all into one, how easy is that to do on a major scale where the conference is running almost 24 hours a day when you have thousands of people? Well I would say sometime it can be straining but overall it is something that I have being doing over the years and to us it is a one two, furthermore it is easier than the whole meat meal, its affordable and we have a very large kitchen and a whole lot of things and we have some real dependable workers so I would say it’s not really hard once you put yourself to it and we are dedicated to our work. What would you say is deferent about the type and ways of preparing of food even by Maroon people? In that sense I would say we are Indigenous people and we consider our food different because we do our authentic meals around here, meaning our food are freshly done and we go all natural, no artificial flavours of any kind and so that is what I would say make our food different. Are Maroons eating the same food now as they eat in times gone by? Maybe a fifty-fifty I would say about that because back in the days, Maroons would consume a whole lot of cassava, they would hunt wild boar, fishing, and I don’t think Maroons today are eating as much of that food as the old Maroons back then. Have Maroons food evolved or new types of food becoming Maroon food? There is no way new food can become Maroon food because if you are talking about back then in the Maroon days, Quao, Nanny, you are talking about cassava, wild boar, you are talking about fishing, ground provision and all those stuffs so I wouldn’t say that. Annette and her team at work 48
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Maroon Magazine 2018_266

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