Yeast

By Robertha White Morgan

“Gosh, mummy, this mayonnaise is not good.”

My sister Coleen’s muffled voice floated out of the open refrigerator in our parents’ house, where she was bent over, one hand braced on the door, the other rummaging at the back of the top shelf. Her head and torso were out of view. From my spot on a stool by the counter under the sliding glass windows, I could see her butt, legs, and feet sticking out in the center of the triangular spill of light. It looked like she was being swallowed up by the fridge.

“Beg yuh lock mi fridge an’ stap let out di cold” 

My mother, armed with her mug of coffee and a slice of hard dough bread, shook her head in annoyance at the growing cluster of condiment bottles on the kitchen counter. Coleen had deemed them unusable, hazardous materials, which meant it wouldn’t be long before they would be relegated to the garbage bin under the kitchen sink.

It was Saturday, day three of my impromptu trip back to Jamaica from Kentucky after seven months away at school, and my sister had come to spend the weekend with me at our parents’ house in the rural parish of Saint Mary. As she often did on her monthly weekend visits, Coleen was fussing. I liked to call it “The Purge”. Never one to travel light, even for just a weekend, she breezed in around 5 p.m. with no less than three stuffed bags —clothes, law books, shoes & sundries.  

Despite assurances otherwise, she had left her house in St Catherine (an hour and a half drive away on the other side of the island) late. With her slow, cautious driving, it took her two hours or more to get to the family home in Saint Mary. As soon as she had arrived and all the bags had been lugged inside, she wanted a cup of tea. The purging had begun after she reached into the corner cupboard in the kitchen for a sachet of Earl Grey. Her eyes had scanned the seasonings packed next to boxes of Lipton black tea, Green tea, Milo, Coffee, and dried Bissy (Kola nut), taking inventory of everything. 

“Mummy when last you clean out in here, this black tea expired last month.”

No amount of protest from my mother would prevent the offending box (or boxes) of stale tea from being tossed into the bin. Coleen did not believe dried goods maintained potency after the recommended ‘use by’ dates. The cornmeal, flour, and sugar were treated to a similar inspection as she searched for weevils. Even the presence of harmless sugar ants meant whatever they had invaded needed to be tossed and replaced immediately. I have always wondered where my sister, two years my senior, got her primness from. Certainly not our mother, who was very much and still is a ‘by the seat of the pants' type in food and most other things.

When we were children, my mother only ever tossed out a few things—eggs, fish, certain fruits— without first doing a sniff or taste test to confirm they were truly ‘off’. We didn’t know that not everyone checked the freshness of their food or whether it was safe to eat in this way. The same thing would happen whenever we had doubts about a particular food item. Days-old stew peas that had been lounging in Tupperware at the back of the fridge? 

“Mummy dis spoil?”  We would ask.

“Hmm? Pass one spoon gimmie.” She would take a casual bite or sip, “Nutten nuh do it man, it can eat.” 

My mother always tried to assuage our concerns. Though we would end up eating whatever had passed Mummy’s test, I would sometimes wait a bit before eating, to see if my sister got an upset stomach. If no one got sick, then of course I would inhale the treat or leftovers with gusto.

Mummy did not grow up with much. There was never nearly enough to feed her mom and dad, and her five siblings. They often went without or with very little. She told us how sometimes she and her siblings would go foraging in their rural community and pick and eat any fruit in season — guavas, mangoes, star apples, you name it, they ate it.

Fruit trees grow everywhere in Jamaica. It’s quite common to find these trees, especially ‘Stringy mangoes’, sweet but annoying to eat because of the hairy flesh that catches in the teeth, just growing by the side of the road, fair game for any hungry passerby or child. Those fruits often supplemented or even replaced dinner when her mother could not stretch the pot so everyone could get a share. 

Though both her parents were hard workers —her mother worked as a domestic helper and baker, and her father was a small farmer who ran a shop— there were never enough pounds and shillings — Jamaica at the time still used British pound sterling as national currency —to buy enough food for a family of seven. I suspect that because she often experienced the lack of something as basic as food, my mother sought to balance this when she became a bill-paying adult with her own family.  As a successful, solidly middle-class police officer, my mother shopped for the little girl she had been, who worried about whether there would be enough to eat or if there would be another meal. She did not and still does not believe in wasting anything, especially food. 

We grew up grocery shopping as if we were stocking a bunker because she always shopped wholesale. I am an excellent bulk shopper today because of all the trips to the wholesale with my mother as a child. My sister and I would pile into my mother’s Pajero, the rear seat folded down for maximum trunk space. We drove 30-40 minutes to a huge wholesale grocery outlet at the end of a narrow street in Saint Ann’s Bay in the neighboring parish.  My sister was in charge of the cart. I was the runner. My mother would inspect her shopping list, covered in her scraggly cursive, and send me off to every corner of the store to grab things while she wandered the aisles. 

“I got the tin mackerel mummy.”

“No not dis one, mi want the Eve mackerel, di price better. Go back and change it, mek sure yuh tek up three.” 

I cannot remember seeing her check labels. Clearing the list by getting the correct and most affordable brand and the right number of each item was more important. My mother believed in using things to the last drop. Whenever the condensed milk ran low, she would heat water in the kettle on the big blue Kelvinator stove, and pour some into the can, making sure to swish it several times to ‘stretch’ the milk for our tea or porridge. To her, expiry dates were never warnings, just suggestions. 

When we were younger, my mother would often buy a large loaf of hard dough white bread. It lived on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen. Bread was a staple at supper before bedtime. We would each get a steaming cup of Milo or milk with a generous helping of condensed milk stirred in and a fat slice of that bread slathered (in my case, anyway) with butter. It’s hot almost year-round in Jamaica, and the bread was made with yeast.  

The yeast in the bread and the constant heat created a perfect environment for the sugars in the bread to break down, making it go slightly green around the edges. This never bothered my mother. She would simply cut off the crusts and any other unsightly bits and pop the slice in the toaster. She maintained that heat “killed everything.” My mother often saved the bread backs (the last slice in the bag) in Ziplock bags in the freezer to make bread pudding. Even now, as an adult, I am convinced that bread pudding tastes better when made with slightly stale bread. 

Going shopping with my mother as an adult is different because I am the one monitoring the list to ensure we get what’s on it. She is like a Magpie in the supermarket and likes to walk around every aisle to see what new items are on the shelves. It’s often not till we are home in the kitchen, unpacking the many bags and boxes —she still shops at the wholesale, never passing up a deal— that she will sometimes look at a tin of mackerel or a packet of dried milk to check the dates. It’s usually an afterthought. I think Coleen’s vigilance with food and urge to toss things may be a direct response to our mother’s somewhat fast and loose approach to food and its preservation. Our mother believed wholeheartedly, back then and now, in heat and refrigeration and never gave us anything to eat that might have harmed us.

Coleen is done with the cupboard now. A bag of flour, a box of black tea, and a tin of ‘bully’ beef have joined the bottles of mayonnaise, jerk seasoning, and salad dressing on the counter. She sighs, mission accomplished, opens the microwave to reheat her cup of Earl Grey, which has grown cold after being forgotten in her frenzied purge. My mother eyes my sister as she shunts the pile on the counter into the bin and ties up the bag to take it out to the larger bin by the gate. She shakes her head and chuckles. Coleen has won this round.

With my children, I take after my mom and not my sister. Though I am not slavish about it, I do check the dates. It’s more of a way for me to calculate just how long past the date printed that I could use or still eat something. I don’t always immediately toss things on the ‘use by’ date as my sister does. When it comes to milk, eggs, and bread, I do check the dates because my sniff and taste test skills are not as highly developed as my mother’s. I will toss things out if they look or smell a bit off, regardless of what date is printed on the box or bag. 

But my children live to eat milk, eggs, and bread, so I rarely need to toss anything in my kitchen because none of those three items ever sit long enough to warrant it. I think my daughter is like me; she will take her chances with food that might be a little bit off. My son is not so willing. On the day I left Jamaica to return to Kentucky, I made a quick stop at the corner shop up the street from my parents’ house to pick up some Jamaican treats that my children were craving. My carry-on bag was stocked with Excelsior cream crackers and National spiced round buns. They plowed through them. A little over a week after we got back, I walked into the kitchen and overheard a minor squabble over the last spiced bun. 

“I can’t believe Samara, yuh eating that bun that expired, that crusty, stale, old, and frail bun!”

My daughter’s voice was muffled as she said, “There’s nothing wrong with it. I put it in the microwave.” 

By Robertha White Morgan