The memory begins here

The Soup That Owns Saturday

In Jamaica, Saturday has a flavour, and that flavour is Red Pea Soup. This is not a suggestion or a recommendation — it is a cultural law as fixed as the tides. On Saturday, Jamaican households across every parish, every class, every denomination make soup.

The Jamaican habit of calling kidney beans 'peas' and making soup every Saturday is so deeply embedded that even second and third-generation Jamaicans in London, Toronto, and New York maintain the tradition. 'Saturday Soup' is one of the strongest surviving food rituals of the Jamaican diaspora.