Haitian Cuisine is Actually quite Exquisite!

As many of my readers know, I am actually a well known and famous Chicago foodie and have been a Chicago foodie well before it was fashionable.

I just made that up, and the truth is just that I eat a lot.

First, I will describe my food background to provide context.

As a child we grew up eating "poor white people's food". My father's words. He was a white guy. A lot of scallop potatoes, various hashes, meatloaf, and, wait for it, "scrapple". 

If you don't know what scrapple is, you weren't actually poor. It is what it sounds like: meat scraps, congealed with some sort mystery "renderings" substance which you fry up on the griddle! It was actually quite tasty.

The minute our parents got divorced, my mom stopped making this food and switched our diet to Haitian peasant food.  Also a little bit of French peasant food.  Mainly rice and beans, with some chicken, sometimes pork, and the occasional lentils cooked with a smoked turkey neck and bread. Also, lots of salads. My mom really believed in salads. My mom liked fish as well, but she thought it was too expensive and, being from an island, didn't think it was fresh enough. It was the 1970's, so the ocean fish probably wasn't all that fresh in Chicago.

On the weekends, my dad would make the white people food we were used to along with the occasional sauerkraut and sausage dish. This was something his mom made due to her German roots, but it was also easy to find and cheap due to the large number of Polish people in Chicago. Really yummy and sauerkraut is actually quite good for you. That reminds me, the carb served was kluski. Not exactly spaetzle, but also an egg sort of pasta. Again, really yummy.

I liked my mom's cooking, but she only got interested in gourmet cooking when I had already left the nest, so food was really more about nutrition for her when I was a kid.

Fortunately, my "play" cousin's aunt was from the same region in Haiti as my mom, a family friend, and she was a bona fide gourmet cook of Haitian style food.

Rice and beans were still the base of any meal, but she knew how to make fish pate, plantains, her own homemade "pickli" (creole word for very spicy pickled vegetables, cabbage and carrots, especially), she knew how to make all of the fancy Haitian-French style sauces, and she also used to make my favorite dish, unique to Haiti, "rix djon djon". It is rice cooked with a Haitian mushroom which gives it a black color and wonderful flavor. We used to call it "black power rice". It was the 1970's so this was a common phrase and there is no need to feel threatened.

In any case, she cooked really exquisite large meals for her family and friends and sometimes even professionally.  I really miss her cooking.

Caribbean cuisines are some combination of the cuisines of the indigenous people (Taino for example), Africans, immigrants from elsewhere in the colonial empire, and the cuisine of whatever European country was trying to steal the land/resources, colonize, enslave, or otherwise exterminate the local population. Probably the only good thing you can say about all of this horror is that it resulted in a lot of interesting food and music along with attractive and diverse looking populations.

In any case, I have eaten lots of food from all over the world and I can assure you that Haitian cuisine is actually quite exquisite! 

Why am I mentioning this you ask? Did you notice how cats and dogs were never mentioned as ingredients?

Addendum:

Yes, obviously, you can have been poor and not know about scrapple. I really did just think of it as a gross sounding, onomatopoetic word to describe some sort of tasty meat by product food.  Wikipedia says the food type is "mush", and it is obviously just another variation of eating everything off the pig from the "snoot to the toot".

My dad really did just introduce us to it as "poor white people's food" and he was laughing. He pretty much laughed about everything.  Anyway, I decided to google it, and it turns out it is associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch, which is to say, really immigrants from southern Germany, which makes sense in retrospect.