The Malabre Family

“SHE DID EVERYTHING…SHE WAS THE PROVIDER. SHE’D WORK THE FIELD, SHE’D GO OUT AND SELL IT IN THE MARKET, AND SHE’D LOOK AFTER US, THE 13 OF US. SHE WAS A GOOD COOK.”

— SOPHIA

JAMAICAN COUNTRYSIDE COOKING

Chevell is christened in Kingston, Jamaica. Religion plays a large role in the Malabre’s cooking. Traditional Sunday meals like rice and peas revolve around the church service schedule.
Sophia Malabre, an avid baker, prepares a cake in her living room in St. Catherine, Jamaica.
Sophia poses in front of her childhood home in St. Catherine, Jamaica.
Evelyn Malabre sits for a photo in Providence, Rhode Island in 1985. Over the years, many of her children and grandchildren joined her in Providence, creating a piece of Jamaica in their new homes where they retained such traditions as Sunday rice and peas.
The neighborhood kids gather for Chevell’s fifth birthday in Kingston, Jamaica, two years before she and her mother immigrated to Rhode, Island.

Evelyn Malabre raised 13 children in the rural parish of St. Catherine, Jamaica. To ensure her children’s future success, Evelyn taught them to rear animals, sow the land, and cook. When her daughter Sophia migrated to the country’s capital, Kingston, she took these lessons with her. Sophia prepared large communal meals for her own family and others in the neighborhood. Food functioned as both a form of celebration and a necessity. Her daughter Chevell remembers learning to cook in their Kingston home by pulling a chair next to the stove and watching her mother work for hours.

While Rhode Island’s Jamaican community is not large, the Malabres maintain their ties to Jamaica through family gatherings and cooking. Every Sunday, Sophia prepares Jamaican staples in the kitchen for aunts, sons, and granddaughters to enjoy. Her mother Evelyn’s influence is present in each dish of rice and pigeon peas, curry goat, and saltfish and dumplings. Chevell cites her mother Sophia and grandmother Evelyn as two of the strongest women she knows—women who worked tirelessly to financially support their families and then labored again at the end of the day to nourish those around them with tastes of home.

Join the women of the Malabre family, Sophia and Chevell, as they prepare callaloo and dumplings, rice and peas & curry goat in their home kitchen.