“Do not tumble the pot.”
When my siblings at I were at the age where we were allowed to dish out our own food, directly from the pot or pan, that was the instruction (in retrospect it was more like an admonishment) given by our mother. That instruction has stayed with me ever since and it is a practice I hold true to.
To “tumble the pot” is to do any or a combination of the following – taking food from all sides of the pot including the middle; turning up or tossing the food looking for particular or additional pieces of meat or fish, other than what came up when you spooned the food on to your plate. Here in Barbados, when rice and peas is cooked, there is often talk about looking for the “prize in the rice”. The prize being one of the 2 or 3 pieces of cut salted pig tails that were cooked in the pot to season the rice and peas. In other words, you are looking for something extra, something in particular or perhaps trying to get to the part of the pot that you like best (say the food at the bottom of the pot/pan). While I reference meat here, this tumbling and turning up of the pot/pan also has to do with when vegetables and certain things are cooked. For example, when there is fried potatoes (aloo), I prefer the bits stuck at the bottom of the pan that have been caramelized. Any vegetable fried (as in our Guyanese-style), the part closer to the bottom of the pan is extremely tasty.
