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The EFFERVESCENT Rosemary Parkinson The award-winning author and creative force behind a series of books on Caribbean culinary culture, Rosemary Parkinson is widely credited with putting the islands on the world foodie map. Words by Natasha Were
ig, beautiful and packed with colourful photographs, spirited stories and mouth-watering recipes, Parkinson’s books take readers careering around the islands on a joyous, vibrant adventure, told through the medium of food. When we speak she is taking a rare morning off, this time from photographing hummingbirds in the Trinidadian bush. Her energy and verve fizz and crackle down the line as the dizzying turns of her life unfold. Born in Venezuela to Trinidadian parents and raised in Barbados, Parkinson is no more able to say where she is from than she is to specify where she lives. At 71 she still hops from island to island, depending on where her latest project takes her, home being wherever she stands. What there is no doubt about is her passion for life, the Caribbean and the world of food. She’s never claimed to be a chef – she couldn’t boil water when she first married, she says – but as a Caribbean citizen, a love of food is in her DNA. “Every single person in the Caribbean is a foodie. We know everything about food,” she chuckles. “We’re always discussing food - and if anyone criticises our food we’ll jump up and down in outrage.”
Her first book, Shake dat Cocktail! came about as the result of a successful reggae bar she ran in Germany, for which she had created a menu of 100 Caribbean-inspired cocktails. When the bar closed as she was relocating to another city, she says, “I had all this information, so I thought, you know what? I’ll put it into a book.” That was 1992 and the start of her career in publishing. At the time, Caribbean cuisine was neither known nor appreciated abroad, but in the late 1990s Parkinson convinced a publisher to take a punt on an ambitious project, Culinaria: the Caribbean, a gastronomic journey through the islands of the Caribbean. “I don’t like the term cook book,” she says, “my books are more a look into island life. They cover history, tradition and celebrations. When people tell me stories I write them phonetically so you can hear them speak. Really, these books are like a movie.” To create Culinaria the publishers sent Parkinson and two photographers, all their equipment, thousands of rolls of film and endless notebooks, off on a six-month trip (all in all) around the Caribbean, from Bermuda to Venezuela, to document the food stories of each island. RL
