And Still I Rise

Sometime last week I tweeted that Farine is another food of Champions. Somehow I assumed that farine was a well known staple throughout the Caribbean. However a fellow blogger shot off a tweet asking what was farine. Since then I have asked asked some other Jamaican friends if they are familiar with farine but none seem to know what I 'm talking about.

For the record Farine is a by product of cassava. Cassava is harvested when it is mature and and scraped to remove the skin. It is then washed thoroughly before it is ground by the cassava mill. Aloma Williams writing for says The ground cassava is then removed or “bailed out with calabashes” - small bowls made from the hollowed-out shell of the fruit from the calabash tree -and transferred in manageable portions into a sack, in which the liquid is wrung out. This drier material is called meal and this is what is used to eventually make farine.

The liquid which is squeezed out is caught in buckets and later put to evaporate in the sun.It's now time to get down to the real farine production. While much attention was being paid to the cassava, other essential tasks were taking place in the background. The copper in which the meal is baked had to be made ready and this included getting it hot. A wood fire was lit under the copper itself and wood fed into it at intervals to ensure that the copper maintains the right temperature to bake the meal into farine.For the salt or original farine, the meal is dished into the hot copper with a bit of salt and stirred vigorously for about half an hour, until it forms into minute, hard grains.For the sweet farine the ingredients make the difference; with a bit of sugar and various spices replacing the salt.

So any Jamaicans know what I'm talking about?