The People and Places of Caribbean Cooking
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-06-23

From family recipes to community cooking in the lockdown, this event explores Caribbean food in the home and beyond. Part of a wider oral history project, which is recording and archiving food memories and stories, this event will tap into stories of migration, belonging and community organising.

Panel members include food writer Riaz Phillips, independent scholar researching the African presence in Yorkshire Joe Williams, cookery writer, former restaurateur and community cook Rosamund Grant, and project-lead on Caribbean Foodways at the British Library Naomi Oppenheim.

Rosamund Grant is a published cookery writer, Caribbean food expert, former restaurant owner and also a psychotherapist. Her 1998 book, Caribbean and African Cookery had a forward by Maya Angelou no less and was an important milestone in bringing Caribbean food to a wider audience. She has authored several other books on Caribbean and African cooking, such as Taste of Africa (1999) and Taste of the Caribbean (2001). In 2001, Rosamund’s oral history was recorded as part of the National Life Stories Collection, ‘Food: From Source to Salespoint’. During lockdown Rosamund has been cooking up a much-needed storm for her local food bank.

Naomi Oppenheim is a Collaborative Doctoral student at the British Library and the Institute of the Americas, UCL. Her doctoral research examines Caribbean diaspora publishing as part of the Caribbean/Black radical tradition. She currently teaches undergraduate and widening participant students at UCL. In 2017/18, Naomi assisted the curatorial team of the British Library’s Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land exhibition. Bringing together her personal and academic knowledge of migration, she contributed to Mother Country: Real Stories of the Windrush Generation (2018). Alongside her academic work, Naomi has been leading a community engagement and oral history project about Caribbean food, with the Eccles Centre, that connects participants' food memories to British Library collection items. She contributes regular blogs to the British Library Americas blogs about a range of Caribbean-centred topics.

Riaz Phillips is a writer, photographer and occasional DJ. His first independently published book Belly Full: Caribbean Food in the UK, was inspired by his own Jamaican upbringing and became an award winning endeavour sold in shops, bookstores, and galleries across the world. His latest project, Save the Last Dub, is devoted to documenting the last remaining Reggae Record shops in the world.

Joe Williams, MA, is a Leeds born arts and heritage activist. He created the Leeds Black History Walk (2009) and Heritage Corner (2014) to disseminate history of the African diaspora in Yorkshire through the arts, education, public walks and social discourse. A co-founder of several theatre, community-arts and history projects in Leeds, Joe has brought many celebrated figures of the African diaspora to life and won a number of awards, including a Points of Light Award, from 10 Downing Street. Joe is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds and an Honorary Fellow at Trinity University, Leeds and hopes to further contribute to the inclusion of African diaspora narratives into mainstream representation, toward social cohesion. Joe is also an oral history participant in Caribbean Foodways at the British Library.

Food Season supported by:
https://www.kitchenaid.co.uk/