REVIEW: Riaz Phillips - “West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica.”
So I’ve been working my way through Riaz Phillip’s beautiful cookbook, West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica.*
West Winds is a cookbook that celebrates the history, flavours, and generational stories behind Jamaican food. It has lots of background history and Riaz Phillips shines a light on how food connects us back to family memories and our history. It’s the kind of book that will encourage you to speak more to the elders in your family, to find out more about their stories and lives.
I can only describe it as a love letter to Jamaica, the diaspora and generational recipes. West Winds feels like a personal diary infused with recipes which capture many of Riaz’s memories.
Here are my favourite things about this book:
It’s easy to navigate. It’s split into 7 sections: Vegan, Raw, soups, nose-to-tail, seafood, flour and water, ferment and preserve. I particularly found the ‘Ferment & Preserve’ section interesting! It features recipes for seasonings, sauces and jams that can change the dynamic of your mid-week meals!
The section on Ital completely changed the way I looked at ‘healthy eating’. Growing up, popular culture often sells healthy eating to us as a punishment for being ‘overweight’ - because, ‘how dare you not look good’. In addition healthy food often excludes the Nigerian staples I was used to. Healthy eating charts would recommend broccoli, brown rice, and blueberries, but never yams, black-eyed beans or okra. Reading through the Ital section was a refreshing for me. It was a reminder that the end goal of a balanced, healthy diet shouldn’t be about vanity, but about having respect for your body, and the “order of life and sustainability of the earth” as Riaz states.
Great gift idea for a food, history lover, as it includes educational and personal food essays. West Winds is helping me understand and explore the history and diversity of Jamaican food. It’s encouraged me to explore outside of the usual jerk chicken and rice & peas I frequently opt for. I feel not having an understanding of the cultures and practices behind the food we eat, creates a distance between the consumer and the ingredients. It just becomes this nutritional transaction, instead of an opportunity to gain respect and understanding for the community around us.
It’ll make you reconnect with your local markets. I love markets, they’re a key part of my life. So as I’ve worked my way through this book, it’s made me frequent local markets more. Local markets are a good way to economically support your community, whilst having exposure to a wide array of ingredients you couldn’t find in supermarkets.
Where to buy a copy:
This is a gifted PR product.*
