Grandma was from Beirut. She was a city girl. My aunt Madelaine says that when she had a tiff with her husband FK she would mutter to all around, “I am a city girl, you know, a city girl.” and he’s a country bumpkin from Chouifait (Shwy-fate).

Grandma had a way about her that was lively and pernickety. She could cook up a fish dinner that rivalled the best offerings of Byblos, the beautiful ancient town on the sea in Lebanon. Byblos was where papyrus was invented and where they wrote the Bible. It is a fishing town and its restaurants are famous for fish dinners and huge family meals. Grandma knew her way around fish.

She made a particular dish that makes my mouth water to think about, and I told my friend Adelina that I was most anxious to try it for myself. This was a fish cooked in tahini sauce that has a tartness to make your mouth water and a satisfying fleshy fish base to appease any appetite. Tahini is sesame oil and can be bought at most supermarkets these days. I will tell you the recipe and you will see how easy it is to cook an exotic dish that the whole family will enjoy. Here is the recipe:

Fish and Tahini – tajen samak bi tahini

Ingredients:

3lbs trout or red snapper

1 1/2 cups tahini (sesame oil)

2 cups sliced onions

2/3 cup olive oil

1 cup lemon juice

2 cloves garlic

1 1/2 tsp salt and pepper to taste

2 tbs snoober (pine nuts)

Grandma’s recipe:

Salt and pepper – score fish and rub right in.

Put in pan and rub all over with olive oil (with oil just barely covering bottom of pan) and broil about 1/2 hour till golden brown or put in oven at 500 oF and bake. Not totally cooked.

Sauce

Peel onions and slice fine lengthwise.

Use plenty of oil in frying pan to cook onions till yellow.

Rub out tahini and add a little water (always before lime juice). Add about 1 cup of lime juice. Add salt. More water (about 2 glasses eventually).

Pour onions and oil into tahini. Mix then add more water. Should taste very sour.

Turn fish over and spoon sauce all over and coat bottom of pan as well.

Add plenty of black pepper and snoober (pine nuts – leave some for decorating). Cut hunks of butter all over top and seasoning salt. Bake at 400oF for about 20 minutes. Baste.

Grandma always cooked her fish whole in a large roasting pan and sent it up to Stony Hill to my mother’s house for our family to enjoy with Syrian bread. We would have a fish feast and think of the story in the Bible of feeding the multitudes.

Grandma’s hands were blessed. So were Grandpa FK’s.

Grandpa had a glass eye that was round and blue and he always had a big cigar in his mouth. He planted every sort of fruit in his big garden on East King’s House Road. He had vegetables including parsley, cucumbers, and tomatoes, as well as plum, ackee and pear trees.

He planted a fig tree that bore beautiful green fruit and another that bore the purple fig. He had a small grape vine. Grandpa would walk around his garden admiring the fruit and saying “Lovely, eh? Lovely!” He was a good man, humble and courteous, and always kind to us children. He and Grandma were a good match, the tiny woman from the city and the village man who married her at 14 and brought her to live in Jamaica with a one-year-old baby on her knee.

Grandma had fourteen children but only five lived. The others were buried one by one under the mango tree in their house on South Camp Road. Grandma said they didn’t want to have dealings with the colonial government to bury the dead babies, but it is also true that this is the way of the village people during times of famine in the Old Country. The dead were buried in the orchards, under the trees, and life went on.

My Grandma was an astute businesswoman and Grandpa FK owned some buildings in downtown Kingston. He did well for himself, for an immigrant who came from the village in the Old Country. These two fine people raised a houseful of girls who married well and made strong grandchildren to eat the plums and the figs in the garden. The fish and tahini sauce was only one of the many dishes Grandma cooked for us. She was an artist of a cook, and I wish I had paid more attention to her when she was with us. I would have been a wonderful cook too, and fed my family, as she did hers.