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For as long as I can remember, cow heel soup was a regular on Caribbean tables. As a child, I did not like the texture, the way it made your lips sticky, and the work to get the gelatinous strips off those big hard bones.
I was a terribly picky eater.
(via The Spruce Eats.)
The smell of milk, carrots and celery made me retch. The textures of different foods produced a range of responses; and that could change weekly. It was rough on my mother and she would balefully tell me so.
“One day when you have your own, you will know how it feels.” (That came to pass!)
Mind you, that didn’t mean I was indulged. I had to sit and finish the food, no matter how many times I retched. I was asthmatic, and the concoctions I was fed outside of meals were foul. I got aloes in lamp oil—vervein and a variety of bush teas. Every single one was a nightmare.
It’s remarkable to me that I developed a deep love for cooking and have embraced the same foods I loathed in childhood. There are a couple of things that still offend my palate and my olfactory senses: coriander, parsley and celery head the list. I didn’t understand why until I learned that a genetic factor was involved.
But to return to the business of cow heel soup.
I believe that the popularity of this soup and a host of other mainstays was derived from the fact that the ingredients were among the cheapest to be had.
Think about it, saltfish, smoke herring, pigtails, smoked bones; those cured cuts that were preserved and thus affordable for the masses. Ground provisions, as we call the array of dasheen, yams, sweet potatoes, eddoes, tannia, potatoes, cassava were common features of home cooking.
They were cheap foods and were the foundations of a cuisine that has a distinctly Caribbean flavour.
Flour-based dishes, including pasta, have practically taken over the scene. Flour, sugar and a scandalous amount of processed foods hoard the limelight.
In 2011, I interviewed the late Dr Theodosius Ming Whi Poon-King, an expert on diabetes, who concluded that refined carbohydrates were the culprit behind the high prevalence in the country. That was from a study done sixty years ago.
“Roti is the root of all evil,” he’d told me with a wry smile—white flour and white rice were the biggest contributors to type 2 diabetes. It is the frequency with which they appear in our diets that make them so lethal.
We’ve been told that diet and exercise are the keys to good health. We’ve been advised to make fresh fruit and vegetables the main characters in our meals.
We live in a country that has the capacity to grow more food, yet we foolishly allow agricultural lands to be diverted into commercial and residential buildings.
Aranjuez, once a food basket, is now sizzling with concrete structures, and the vendors’ stalls are being squished away.
The price of the food that once sustained us has risen unconscionably. Tastes have changed, that is true, and the predilection for imported, processed goods has altered our feeding patterns dramatically.
(Copyright TT.UNDP.org.)
Schools, and their precincts, sell the most sweetened drinks and processed foods imaginable, and from early, children are being weaned on damaging diets.
Policy matters—that is the advice from a group, Healthy Caribbean Coalition, as they talk about the unhealthy prevalence of these items in the schools. It makes sense.
School cafeterias in particular should not be allowed to carry these insidious items. It’s not impossible to implement, and it has been done in other countries, with marked reductions in childhood obesity, and healthier lifestyle choices.
I realise that I have strayed from my original intent, which was to talk about cow heel, but I figure everything is connected. You see, I grew to love cow heel soup once I started making it myself. But I never reconciled myself to the bulkiness on account of the bones.
I would boil the heels for about an hour and wash off the impurities, then put it in the pressure cooker with lots of herbs and aromatics until it was tender.
(I looked at a lot of online recipes for cow heel soup, and I didn’t see any that advised boiling the heels first to remove impurities. Maybe that is a given. I only learned about this by seeing someone prepare chicken foot soup by boiling first.)
Once it was cool, I would sit with a paring knife and separate the yummy stuff from the bones. Generally, I would keep just a few of the bones for the actual soup. I used to do it often because cow heel was about $9 a pound.
I haven’t done it for a while, but a conversation with my sister (who was the reason I started making it), made me decide to do a big batch for her. She now lives in Canada and she was telling me that she finds the cow heels she gets there don’t yield the gelatinous flavour she loves.
She’s here for a couple of weeks, and I decided I would do some and freeze them in small packages so she could make some soup flavoured with herbs from my backyard.
(via Eat Ah Food TT.)
I went searching, and was shocked that cow heels are now $22 to $23 a pound. Eventually, I found some that were priced at $17 and I bought them. But it made me indignant.
Saltfish is expensive, pigtails too, everything is over-priced. What makes it so unpalatable, is that with the supermarkets jostling with each other, they are able to promote ‘specials,’ where the prices drop to a level that, while still high, tells you that they are capable of keeping them at a more reasonable state.
It’s a shame that these ingredients which formed part of our rich culinary culture are being pushed out of our reach. We want to promote that delicious aspect of our heritage, but we can’t do it when we have reached the stage where those precious victuals are unattainable.
If home-cooking has been reduced to breading and deep-frying from frozen packages, and heating processed foods, then what’s the point of living in a tropical country?
Policy matters—maybe an intervention is necessary.
Editor’s Note: The Ministry of Education prohibited the sale or serving of sugar sweetened beverages at schools, via a circular memorandum on 5 May 2017.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
