Nostalgia 16
In F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, one of the pastimes of the indulgent rich was prolonged conversation on “The Best of Everything and Anything.” Of course this was possible because in the thirties there was no television – the nemesis of banter and conversation between family and friends.
In subsequent years, the Best of Everything was extended by newspapers and magazines to annual polls on Jazz, restaurants, the worst dressed, the rich and famous, MVPs and today’s popular Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues.
In recording my Nostalgias I have always cherished the idea of sharing my best – titillating your palette to simultaneously evoke your best for comparison, especially since we may have been in the same church – different pews, different times – but all on the same heady, wonderful journey of life in ‘O Beautiful Guyana’ of yesteryear.
Mauby
Mauby: Guyana’s pint, not as potent as creek water, which after a meal of labba, will ensure you return some day, to the Mudland, despite the sensational mayhem. Derived from a bark with no claim to aphrodisiac potency like capadulla – there’s that old Chinese cookshop excuse given to the calypsonian who complained to the Chinese cook that every time he forked the low mein meat it yelped like a ‘dog.’ The cook assured him that what he was hearing was the mauby ‘bark.’
Every Guyanese has their favourite mauby shop, and I am convinced that everyone’s best was the mauby from the cake shop at the corner where they lived. Blending mauby is not rocket science. Pour the boiled concentrate into water, add sugar – preferably brown – and stir vigorously. It’s an old wives’ tale that you must have old mauby to blend a new batch – add spices, and leave in the sun to percolate.
As quality is not the main criterion, then it’s quantity, and who can beat a large glass of Chuck-A-Sang’s mauby (Murray – now Quamina and Cummings Sts) – 2 cents in 1945. Runner-up would be in the early fifties, Mount Eagle (Camp and Regent Sts) after games on Thomas Lands.
Lest my locations are queried, there was a Mount Eagle at Wellington St and North Rd, 1950, opposite the Chinese Temple Lodge.
Southside, across the street, was DeRyck’s lemonade in the marble bottles, which mixed with mauby equalled any shandy, or better, cream soda and carnation milk.
Recently, I paid US$0.50 in Orlando, Florida, for a medium glass of Mauby that had enough ice to sink the Titanic.
Black pudding
Black pudding: Guyana’s weekend gourmet dish, better than Scottish haggis, but then they don’t add married-man pork. My first encounter with this delicacy was around 1944. Jimmy’s in Robb Street was the best during WWII, when my father, ordering the family quota, accepted ‘hot,’ expecting hot off the fire. As the eldest son, I received the first taste. Tongues of fire seared thru’ my ears like the Savoy 1947 fire. My eyes popped out of their sockets; my kisser singed like a branded Rupununi heifer; my nose felt like I had sneezed Drano and worse – pepper burns, both ways.
Betty entrenched herself as the BP Queen beginning in the early fifties from a bottom house (Regent St, west of Bourda Market and the Employment Exchange). She had far more customers than her neighbour Lyken’s on Norton St, and was still the best on Regent St, Bourda, in the eighties.
Her Maws was a Kaieteur delight, and my only complaint was her assistant Ralph, whose servings of the companion souse was as meagre as ‘the ‘ol lady’s in the shoe.’ He must have come from a large family.
Mrs Subryan on Church St offered home-made standard, comparable to my mother’s. Another BP delight was the vendor with huge bandaged legs outside the rum shop at Robb and Cummings Sts – sold out before the six o’clock bee. Her addition of a final dab of oil with a wafted feather to the sliced portions was Japanese fan-dance artistry.
Of course, every Guy-anese mother is their children’s best cook, no matter how far they wander from home, and young brides today offer no challenge. I am convinced that this is the reason for the current high divorce rate.
Chinese food
Chinese food: Without specifying any special Chinese dish, and having eaten in every Chinese cookshop from Skeldon to Morawhanna, my unchallenged best would be Sheila’s on America St in the fifties. Scrubbed tables for eating – tablecloth as foreign as the Black Watch of the sixties – in a real down-to-earth market setting. The only stars they would have received from AAA would be for the $1.25 mixed low mein, wanton soup or eddoe duck every Sunday. The crispy Char Siu Pork – a gastronomical delight that could have earned Guyana a world title in any culinary Olympics 50 years before Six Head Lewis.
The National on Robb St was the popular best in the seventies and is still a favourite export to Canada – ask the Guyanese in Toronto. Yong Hing’s Chinatown, and later the Bamboo Gardens as well as the Orient above Bostwick’s Drug Store, were guaranteed tasty Oriental food for entertaining, or back-up when the family stove ‘na wuk.’ Chinese restaurants are today as popular and proliferate as much as Peter Taylor’s Town Talk political gossip column in the seventies.
Chicken in the rough
Chicken in the rough: Deep-fried chicken in a basket, with a variety of extras on the side that varied according to the buy local – can’t get – need to substitute for the basic customary French fries.
Oasis, at Robb and King St, set the standard and allegedly introduced the basket serving.
Sip and Chat, Rendezvous, Brown Betty, Farm Fresh, were consistently good quality, worthy to carry home, as appeasing offers and excuses to waiting spouses for staying out late with the boys.
Always wondered, if the baskets, were a distinct Guyanese marketing first, but the finger bowl after the chicken entr
