Creole queen Cheryl owes it all to granny
AT the age of eight Cheryl Ricketts started learning some cooking skills from her grandmother in Trinidad, but she did not start with the easiest of tasks.
The first thing she learned was how to pluck and truss a chicken.
“It was a rural area and my grandmother showed me how to do it,” said Cheryl.
And over the next few years her grandmother, a considerable cook herself, passed on a wealth of knowledge. How much rum to use in a marinade, how to tie a bouquet garni, how to cook meats and bake bread and cakes. By the time she was 13 Cheryl could cook pretty much any dish she needed to. And to this day eating dishes such as pelau (a rice dish similar to paella) flat bread, curry chicken and macaroni pie will take her right back to those days.
These early lessons in her grandmother’s kitchen sparked a lifelong passion and now Cheryl, from Kingsthorpe, Northampton, is using what she has learned during a lifetime of cooking to produce Creole and contemporary Caribbean cuisine with her company The Creole Kitchen which provides catering for corporate events and private functions.
It is a new venture for Cheryl, who came to live in this country when she was 15 and spent 39 years in the banking industry, working at Barclays.
Then last year she decided to take the plunge, take early retirement from her job as a supervisor, and make cooking her new career. It was something she had always dreamed of doing but was never able to in the past. She said: “I thought if I don’t do it now I will never do it.”
Now she is on a mission to spread the word about Creole cooking and to encourage people who may not have tried it to give it a go and even try cooking with some of the ingredients that are part of this cuisine, such as plantain, yam, breadfruit, salt cod and christophene which is a type of gourd.
Creole food developed as people from all over the world settled in the Caribbean bringing their own recipes and adapting them to the local produce. French, African, Asian, Lebanese, Mediterranean, they have all had their influence. Cheryl believes there is plenty for people to enjoy in Creole cooking precisely because it is a combination of so many cooking styles.
She said: “When we eat something we eat with our eyes firstly. The food has colour, it’s colourful but the thing that really gets you is the flavour.”
The original dishes were hearty meals designed for people doing a day’s physical work, but Cheryl aims to cook them in an authentic but contemporary way, something lighter to suit modern tastes.
She enjoys seeing people enjoy her food, whether that is catering for 300 people at a function or cooking for her family at home, she said: “Like on Christmas day, I know I enjoy seeing people eat and it makes me feel warm and nice when everybody is happy. Just seeing everybody diving in and I’m running in and out . . . it’s cooking with love.”
To contact The Creole Kitchen call 07716 173115 or email creole55@btinternet.com
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