Share the Feast at Our Table
by Sin Blaché
Date: 21/12/2020
The Colour of Festivity
I’ve always thought winter time is the best time to come from an inter-racial family.
My mother comes from a Creole Black American family with strong ties to New Orleans. Our family’s oral history, like a lot of Black families, promises Native heritage but the actual truth is lost. My father is Dublin through and through, and there are whispers of us being able to trace the family name all the way to Brian Boru. I was born in San Francisco and, when we moved to Ireland, I was put into gaelscoileanna and gaelcholáistí. My sister was born in Dublin; we speak in different accents.
We’re not a household of absolutes. It’s difficult to be absolutely anything when you’re so much of everything.
This joyful mix of people and histories brings emotional strength. And I believe, too, that it’s important to tell interesting stories, recount them as gifts to the world. That’s a strength, too.
At the end of the year the people around us vary or, to be more accurate, they have varied in the past. I’m writing this at the tail end of September, longing for both Halloween and Christmas in equal measure, knowing that neither will be the same as they were. Let’s pretend, then. Just for a moment. Cast your mind back to overstuffed rooms and people laughing together, recalling mixes of accents and languages adding their own lyricism to the music that plays.
Because there are always musicians in the house. Nearly all of us can play something, or sing something. My fondest memories are of us all sitting in a circle in the kitchen, my father playing the guitar, singing some old tune that his father used to sing, twinned with harmonies from surrounding musician friends and family. Me; playing along, trying to keep up.
Working out the melody as it reveals itself. Learning by doing, and by listening, sitting in a whole house alive with music.
These impromptu concerts have always happened whenever there’s more than two of us in a room. I’ve always treasured them, these exchanges of music, and how we all learn from each other.
Everyone always has a song. One family favourite is an original song written by a friend, half of it sung in Spanish. An ode to the planet, a mourning song about droughts and bright green avocados, of high demand and blissful, damning, ignorance.
Like the music, the food we cook for Christmas is traditional, but it isn’t rigidly so. We have the usual turkey, of course, but always try to find a good ham as well. The glazing is a two-day job, and the entire house is employed to participate. “If you think about ham,” my mother always says, finally sitting down after getting even more things done in the kitchen, “then get up and glaze it.”
Eating the ham is a joy, of course, but the act of breathing in the hazy and sweet air from the oven, adding another layer to an already perfect looking dish, knowing that it’s a shared responsibility — all of that makes it special.
No-one does ham like my mom does ham, because no-one else has an army of friends adding to it with such patient, focused care.
My dad is a man obsessed with soups. He’s always on the hunt for the perfect Nigerian pepper soup recipe. He’s yet to find it, but I suspect that it’ll be employed as a post-Christmas hangover cure when he achieves his goal. One of the best meals he cooks is a turkey and rice soup, days after the main feast. The meat stews for hours in a giant pot, the smell permeating through the house. There’s nothing that can beat the comforting warmth of soft rice, tender turkey, over-spiced vegetables and freshly baked bread.
My mother is a woman of vast talents. I don’t think there’s many things that she can’t do — and I’m sure that anything that escapes her abilities are things she has no interest in, anyway. One of her talents is baking. She once made a Tunisian orange cake that was, for lack of a better term, dangerous. We usually have a collection of quintessentially Black American comfort food at the table; baked sweet potatoes, homemade gravy, cranberry sauce. There’s the animated explanation of what grits are, if anyone asks.
Sometimes, even though I know the answer, I ask about grits just to hear stories of what food was cooked by my grandmother. A woman I never really knew, but someone whose recipes still feed us.
I know that everyone loves their own traditions. I know that everything we do, either with family or found family or the ones who have found us, mean the most to us. And my hope is that, in the darkest and coldest days of the year, while we are all struggling with finding new ways to make it all work, I might share with you some of the strength that comes from the brightest and most colourful parts of my own family.
