How cooking curry goat helped me learn about my heritage and connect with family and friends

For most of my formative years, my Black father was gone on deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. This, plus the fact that he had fractured relationships with a handful of family members, meant I grew up not knowing much about my Black heritage.

I knew my grandmother Enid was a prim and proper woman. I knew she was a health nut before health nuts were cool. I knew her family was Ghanaian, but she was born in Cuba and grew up in Jamaica.

It was this Jamaican connection that would lead me on a path of culinary and cultural discovery.

I tried asking about my grandmother on various occasions as I got older. My father often quoted her when dispensing his parental wisdom to me, and it made me want to know more about her. But he can really only remember certain episodes and anecdotes from his brief time with her. He roamed wild through the streets of Brooklyn for much of his childhood, was shipped off to boarding school in his adolescence, and my grandmother passed away when he was just 19. So, when I asked my dad if he remembered any of my grandmother’s recipes in an effort to connect with her through one of my favorite pastimes, he referred me to my aunt Fay, his older sister who lives in Oregon.

I called my aunt one Tuesday and asked her to tell me all she remembered about my grandmother in the kitchen.

“Even though we didn’t have, like, the ideal Cosby family type of a presentation,” my aunt said, “Mommy actually liked cooking, and she was very secretive about most, if not all, of the meals she prepared. She did not like to share her secret recipes.”

Perhaps that’s why there is no family cookbook that exists to be passed down throughout the generations. As a result, I had to look up a curry goat recipe online when I found out that was one of the traditional Jamaican dishes she loved to make.

“Everyone raved about her curry goat,” my aunt said. “Curry goat always smelled like the most tasteful…it made my mouth water. She would cook it all day long in the slow cooker … the house always smelled very fragrant.”

My aunt remembered my grandmother as appearing very lost in thought as she cooked. “You had a sense [cooking] was a connection to her history,” she said. “Her mother died at a young age, so she had to learn how to cook … on her own and she was from a large family.”

I can’t help but wonder if she was reminiscing about her childhood as she stood over her slow cooker.

As my dad and his siblings grew older, my aunt said my grandmother spent less time cooking. Her job as the head nurse in the county hospital’s psychiatric ward began occupying more of her time, and my aunt increasingly had to fend for herself. Whenever my grandmother returned to the stove, however, my aunt recalled feeling cared for by her cooking.

It was then I decided on what I was going to do. Not only was I going to cook this culturally significant dish that was clearly important to my grandmother, I was going to further honor her by sharing this curry goat with my friends, caring for them through food as she cared for my dad and his siblings through food.

The shopping trip

In order to make the curry goat, I needed specific ingredients, which I thought would be impossible to find living in Columbia, Missouri. Fortunately, one of my friends knew of an African market in Columbia’s East Business Loop.

As a mid-March snowstorm bore down on Columbia, I made my way to this international market to buy goat, Jamaican curry powder, a scotch bonnet pepper, dried thyme, and tomato paste.

Stepping into the market was like traveling through time and place: through my father’s childhood, through my grandmother’s Jamaican home, through my ancestors’ tribal homelands.

The shelves were lined with canned callaloo, ingredients for rice and peas (another famed Jamaican dish), and immigrant staples from my father’s youth (Uncle Ben’s rice and Malta Goya sodas). It was almost surreal how they had this bounty of cultural ingredients in the middle of the Midwest; every aisle was a chance for me to connect to my heritage.

Even the interactions I had inside the store, with the only other patron and the shopkeeper, were culturally significant. The recipe called for a single scotch bonnet pepper, but the peppers were only sold in large bags (spice is a staple in African and Caribbean cuisine).

I asked if it was possible for me to buy only one from the bag, and when the shopkeeper told me it wasn’t, the other patron (a traveling nurse originally from Cameroon) offered to buy the bag for me and let me take one pepper from it.

We got to talking (I found out he used to live just five minutes away from me), and he asked me if Columbia ever bored me. I told him that sometimes, yes, it does, to which he responded, “A student can never be bored.”

That was like a slap in the face to me; I realized I had been “African fathered.” I just laughed, and texted my dad about the exchange. He replied, “Yup…you got African fathered. Have heard those exact words before. That’s why I never told my parents I had nothing to do.”

He conveyed just how jealous he was that I hadn’t waited to cook the curry goat when I returned home, and it made me feel a certain sense of pride that I was cooking a dish that had such personal significance to my dad.

Cooking as an act of love

The recipe wasn’t the only deviation from how my grandmother had prepared her curry goat. I didn’t have access to a slow cooker, so I had to find a recipe that would allow me to recreate the delicate textures and robust flavors of curry goat in a relatively short amount of time.

I seasoned and browned the goat in a pot and added the spices. Immediately, the curry powder filled the air with a warming and mouth-watering scent.

The scents wafting through the air made every passerby of the communal kitchen either turn their heads and peer in through the window to see what we were preparing, or stop in to mention how good the basement of our residence hall smelled.

As the goat seasoned in a mixture of curry powder, ginger, garlic, pepper and tomato paste, I chopped the onion to toss into the pot before adding the water that would serve as the base for the silky broth the goat and potatoes would marinate and cook in.

I had deeply meaningful conversations with a friend who’d agreed to help me cook; we talked about our childhood and cultural experiences while we cooked and waited for the goat to be done. She also helped me realize I would not be serving the curry goat with a traditional side of rice and peas because I had not soaked the red kidney beans overnight, which I did not know had to be done.

So, I cooked rice to serve with the goat and left the peas for another day.

The feast

I sent pictures of the cooking curry goat to my aunt and my dad, and their responses made me incredibly eager to savor the end result. My aunt said she could smell the curry goat through the screen, and my dad once more conveyed his jealousy that I would get to consume the delicacy instead of him.

After the two hour mark had passed, I called my friends down to the basement kitchen and invited them to sit for the meal.

I spooned the curry goat and broth over a bed of rice and prepared to savor the results of my attempted recreation.

The broth was immeasurably rich and flavorful, despite being thin, and the heat from the scotch bonnet coated the back of my throat with a comforting burn.

To my dismay, the goat was not fall-off-the-bone tender like my aunt had remembered my grandmother’s being; it was tough and tendony. Perhaps I didn’t get the best cuts of goat, or perhaps my lack of time and a slow cooker was my downfall.

My friends were less critical of my work, but I chalked it up to them simply being nice. I walked away from the kitchen feeling like I had failed my grandmother and my ancestors in some way, but my aunt and my dad assured me my grandmother would be proud of me for honoring her memory as I had.

I thought back to what my aunt said about my grandmother while she cooked.

To cook, for her, was to reconnect with her past, and in so many ways, that was the same experience I’d had. I’d cook for my grandmother. I’d cooked for my father and aunt. Like my grandmother, I’d cooked without the benefit of my family showing me the way and teaching me the finer points. And, most of all, like her, I’d brought the past to the present day in the form of her memory and, in the process, turned a meal from mere savory calories to an act of loving care.

This story was originally published June 16, 2022 at 10:00 AM with the headline "How cooking curry goat helped me learn about my heritage and connect with family and friends."