In the summertime, we’d go visit my grandfather’s sister in Queens. That was the Barbados side of the family. Every summer, they’d have a big barbecue pig roast: the whole hog. That was the highlight of my summer.
The women would be filling up jars with dried fruit and putting Bajan rum in with the fruit. Then at Christmastime, they would use that fruit to make rum cake. The adults would give the kids rum cake if they were acting too crazy to try to calm them down and make them go to sleep, because literally you could get drunk off of that cake.
I remember the two sides of my family from the kinds of homemade hot sauce they made. The Puerto Rican side made a red, vinegary hot sauce with pickled and fermented peppers. The Barbados side made a yellow hot sauce that was super spicy.
My grandmother passed away when I was still very young, but I think her soul lives in me, with respect to the food. I live my life doing the things she loved to do: cook, feed people, eat good food, and drink wine. I like to think that my grandmother would be proud of me. But I am also fairly sure that she looks down on me from heaven and she says, “If you’d had more time in my kitchen, you would be an even better chef than you are now. And for sure, your Spanish would be better.”