Minister Robert Campbell - On recipes (clip)

Minister Robert Campbell: “I miss him teaching us how to play the piano…My grandfather, he could blow, he could blow. He was our inspiration. Sometimes, sitting around telling the tales about growing up and the things he had to endure. I think it just made him a more persistent and stronger person. And, in doing so, to teach his children, as well as his grandchildren, how to fend for themselves. If you have a craft, the ability to do things, you can take the discipline from learning that trade and you can add it to another one. But I know that for me, I know when I was working with my uncles ̶ you know I loved working with them, they were fun working with, you learn different things working with them but I always said ̶ this is not for me. And I began to realize it wasn’t for me, I think it was around about 1963. My grandfather he passed away in ‘64 or ‘65, I can’t remember which it was, it was so cold. We would work with them when we were out of school, and I said, if you don’t make your money from springtime to late fall, you’ve got to have security, some funds prior to winter. Because with winter when the rain and the snow came, if you didn’t already have a structure where you had to build some inner walls on the inside, it’s hard to work outside, but I was fortunate enough. My Aunt Louise, she was one of those ladies that was excellent when she cooked. She could cook. And I had the opportunity with Mama Dip to watch how they did things. It was such an upbringing that they were not afraid to show you their skills. If I just listened to them and my grandmother, and just could’ve wrote some things down. My grandmother used to say, ‘go out there in the yard. You see that tree over there? That’s an animal tree, and that’s a beechwood tree there. I need some bark off that tree, I need some off that and bring me some of the leaves off of the willow tree.’ It’s too warm to build a fire, but she made a brew out of it. She would give it to us and said it would keep her from catching colds, keep our fevers down and things like that. But learning how to cook I decided that, well you know there’s one thing that’s always going to happen. People are going to want to eat, and some are not going to want to cook for themselves. And so that was one of the reasons why I went into the culinary arts.”

MCJC Staff: “Was there anything from learning on the build sites, from your uncles and grandfather that you transferred over to cooking? Like were there any skills that prepared you?”

Campbell: “Yes, yes! A recipe for anything is building or putting something together. So to experiment with all the different spices, you learn that when you get ready to put a meal together, that there are certain spices that work better in that meal rather than others. But also you prepare for how many people you are going to serve. And so it’s just like how many blocks is it going to take to build the foundation, how many bricks is it going to take to build the eve around the foundation and different things. How many two by fours you are going to need is just like how many teaspoons of this, how many cups, a half a cup of flour? It all depends. So you transfer those skills to the things you are doing. Yeah.”