Austin Clarke's profoundly delicious culinary memoir has nothing to do with desserts. As he quickly makes plain, "Barbadians use the term 'sweet' to express our love and appreciation for all food that is cooked appetizingly," and that means neither written recipes--a word he never heard growing up (relax, he does include them)--nor elaborate equipment.

Clarke vividly describes the pot, propped on three rocks, that was the stove that produced the "bakes" and "privilege" and other dishes of his formative years. These dishes--intimately linked to the rhythm of the domestic week--were threads in the larger tapestry that is the story of the Barbadian people, especially the slaves who relied on cheap, fast food like cou-cou (cooked cornmeal) to maintain their strength.

This is mom and grandmom food: the ingredients--"ingreasements"--never measured, touch as key as flavour. Clarke describes "picking" rice for impurities, "using your ten fingers" to rub seasonings into chicken, and choosing a pig's tail by rooting around in the barrel and feeling "the nice clutching sensation of the brine, tingling through your pores and tightening up the veins of your two hands". All vital, in his view. "If you do not touch-up and love-up the meats and the ingreasements, your food is not going respond and taste sweet when it done," he insists. Winner of an entire buffet of literary goodies (including the 2002 Giller Award), the Toronto-based ex-pat balances anecdotes, history, lore, and conversations in the lovely, lilting voice of the Caribbean; he describes pork chops as "something that is going to stick to your ribs and clothe you in a warmth of gastronomical satisfaction". If ever a book called to be read aloud on a frigid Canadian night...

Teeming with life and humour, Love and Sweet Food reminds us how important it is to cook and eat together, however simple the fare. But above all, it is Clarke's joyous homage to his mother, aunts, cousins, and grandmothers: "those strong, beautiful, black, light-complexioned and white women who nurtured me, fed me from their hands from their pots, loved me and turned me into the man I am today." Amen to that, say his readers.