My babysitter, Jennie, had a significant role in my upbringing—my mother and father hit the jackpot when they found her. A loving, bighearted woman with a generous laugh, Jennie lived with us on weekdays from 1988 until 1998, as I went from nursery school through junior high. During that decade, my family moved from Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to the suburbs of Westchester, my parents changed jobs, my older brother and I went through a period of particularly brutal sibling rivalry, the economy boomed, the Internet happened, and we traded our Walkmans for Discmans. And Jennie was there through it all. The better part of my childhood had Jennie’s unconditional love strung through it, and now, nearly 25 years since we met, Jennie and I maintain a close relationship.
Jennie and I really got to know each other through food. After school I would sit on a wooden stool in the kitchen while she prepared dinner for my brother and me. I would do my homework or—more likely—we would gossip about my friends and about the television programs we would watch together in the evenings (we never missed Family Matters). Jennie’s cooking for us was about pure efficiency, about getting us fed quickly and easily. She prepared simple, straightforward, thoroughly American stuff like macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, and twice-baked potatoes. Every now and then, and usually only if I begged her, she would roast Cornish hens packed with Stovetop stuffing, which made me feel like royalty—a whole bird, just for me!
Jennie didn’t personally love the food that she made for us, so she would spend weekends at her studio apartment in Brooklyn making food native to St. Vincent, the small Caribbean island where she was born and lived until adulthood, when she moved to the States to pursue work. On Monday mornings, Jennie would arrive at our house with shopping bags loaded with containers that she’d stow in the back of our refrigerator. Throughout the week she’d heat up chicken curry or fish stew or pilau, a fragrant, spiced rice with soft lentils and hearty bits of chicken. She’d eat her food while our chopped beef was simmering for a pasta casserole.
I coveted Jennie’s food. It wasn’t like anything I ate at school or at anyone else’s house and, even more, it wasn’t like any of the dishes prepared on the food television shows I devoured or in cookbooks I kept by my bed. (I have always been food-obsessed.) Sometimes she’d fill a small bowl for me or tear off a piece of her roti and wrap a bit of curried goat in it and delight in how much pleasure I took in her food. Occasionally I’d persuade Jennie to make bakes—small deep-fried, savory Caribbean bread rolls. I summoned all of my patience and willpower while she insisted that they cool as she pulled them, so beautifully browned, from the hot Crisco.
Nearly a decade after Jennie moved on from our family, when I was a recent college graduate living in Manhattan, I asked her to teach me how to make her chicken pilau. When I walked into her apartment in Brooklyn, she immediately told me that when I’m in her home I “need to be free.” She was referring to “all of them buttons” on my men’s oxford shirt and my blue jeans, the same uniform I’ve worn every day since Jennie has known me. She told me to change into one of her housedresses since it would be less constraining. I hesitated and tried to explain to her that I am comfortable in my clothing. I soon realized that my argument was futile and gave in. It was the first time I had worn a dress in years. Without asking, she rubbed my pale, dry arms with cocoa butter. “You were softer when I took care of you!” Later that evening when I was on the subway headed home I discovered that she had tucked a container of the salve in my coat pocket.
Jennie prepared the chicken pilau with intuition and ease. She measured nothing, answered phone calls, showed me photographs of her nieces and nephews, stirred the pot. She coaxed the temperature on her tiny stove, the centerpiece of her kitchen, which is really just one small wall of her apartment. She boiled water for tea and opened her cabinet, its contents nearly bursting (Jennie doesn’t throw anything away). She pulled out two of the mugs from the collection we’ve been building over the years—I try to send her one from each place I travel. I drank my tea, rich with evaporated milk and sugar, from a Prague mug while she took colorful Las Vegas for herself.
While we had tea, I announced it was time for me to go to St. Vincent with her. As a child I swore to her that once I was an adult and had actual paychecks, I would purchase us airplane tickets if she promised to show me around her home. Jennie agreed and less than a year later, our trip was booked. At 4:30 a.m. on the day of our trip, Jennie—my consummate caretaker—called to make sure I was awake to meet her at the airport in time for our flight. That I was an adult, had been living on my own in Manhattan for a few years, and had already been traveling extensively for work didn’t faze Jennie—apparently the night before she had called my mother promising to “take care of our baby.”
Jennie was so entwined in my background that I often wondered, especially as I got older, about hers, about where and from whom she came. All of a sudden I was there, meeting her sister, her mother, her brothers and nephews, aunts, and most everyone else it seemed. Even when we walked through the outdoor fruit market, seeing coconuts piled high on the back of trucks and plantains ripening in the afternoon sun, Jennie couldn’t get down the street without having someone stop her to say hello. I realized, then, that I wasn’t alone in my adoration of Jennie.
I felt that each meal we ate during the trip was an opportunity to better understand where Jennie comes from. We drank tall glasses of cold, fresh passion fruit juice and lots of Mauby, a sweet beverage brewed with tree bark—it reminded me of the Mauby Jennie used to make from scratch when I was a kid and the jars she kept slowly brewing in the back of my parents’ kitchen cabinet. At her friend Annette’s house, we ate breaded, fried okra, plantains, and codfish, along with white rice and callaloo —a green that’s earthier than spinach and sweeter than kale. We continued to be fed and taken care of by Mrs. George, the mother of one of Jennie’s closest friends, at her home, where we stayed. In the mornings, Mrs. George piled her breakfast table high with toasted hot dog buns, boxed milk, cereal, fried eggs, sliced tomatoes, a bowl of margarine, and a plate of chopped iceberg lettuce. In the evenings she told us to help ourselves to the contents of her pressure cooker, filled with what seemed like a bottomless amount of heady chicken broth with small, dense dumplings.
We ate mangoes everywhere we went. Scraping the caramel-sweet, unbelievably lush fruit from the skin with my teeth, I was sent back to my parents’ kitchen, where Jennie and I would regularly share a mango after school. I never knew until I went to St. Vincent, though, what a mango could truly taste like. I realized then that the flavor I never knew about was probably the same flavor that Jennie longed for all those years trying to find a ripe one at the bottom of the pile at our New York grocery store. Jennie introduced me to new tastes, too, including the addictively sweet-and-sour combination of tamarind pulp mixed with sugar, as well as plum roses, a fruit with the crunch of an apple mixed with the flavor of rosewater and plum.
Everyone in Jennie’s life was warm and welcoming, eager to meet me after hearing about me for so many years. In its own sweet way, my handful of days in St. Vincent was a kind of homecoming. An opportunity for me to connect with Jennie’s community, traveling to St. Vincent allowed me to see precisely where her values and customs—the same ones she passed along to me—come from. I got to grow up with someone who modeled self-respect and devotion to her family; someone with the courage to pursue an independent life. Someone with an unabashed capacity for tremendous laughter. In taking myself out of my home and into hers, I better understood Jennie. And with that, in a way that was almost automatic, I better understood myself.
Julia Turshen coauthored Spain: A Culinary Road Trip with Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow, assisted Paltrow on her book My Father’s Daughter, and worked on the PBS show and companion book Kimchi Chronicles with Jean-Georges and Marja Vongerichten. She has written for Epicurious, GOOP.com, InterviewMagazine.com, and Food & Wine.