(Bloomberg) -- Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, April Jackson always had sorrel at Christmas. 

The crimson-colored drink is a staple holiday drink in the Caribbean nation. It’s made by brewing plump hibiscus flowers at the end of the year when fresh hibiscus is traditionally available, along with such spices as ginger, cinnamon sticks, cloves and orange peel. The deep red color looks festive.

“In the UK, people drink sorrel all year round. But for us growing up, you didn’t see sorrel on the table unless it was Christmas,” Jackson says. She has strong memories of the drink being given as gifts “in an old Wray & Nephew [rum] bottle that had the labels removed.” Each bottle showcased a different family recipe and was invariably spiked with rum. As a child, Jackson was excited to enjoy a non-alcoholic version of the drink in a wine glass to help her “participate in Christmas dinner feeling like a grown up.” 

Jackson, who was crowned Miss Jamaica in 2008 before arriving in the UK in 2015, continues to make sorrel a feature of her holiday festivities at home. 

Now, as the founder of Wood & Water restaurant and SideChick cocktail bar in Brixton, Jackson is among the scores of Black chefs, from Senegal and Ethiopia to Haiti, who have brought holiday feasts with them to the UK. And even if the dishes traveled intact, the setting makes the celebration feel different.

Khadim Mane, founder of the Peckham-based restaurant Little Baobab, remembers spending Christmas in Senegal as a child. There, a crowd of people worked together to produce the meal: “All the siblings would be there. We’d invite all the neighbors, too, and everyone would prep food together.” They shared food from big, communal plates. Mane still follows the tradition by inviting friends to his house, but here he does almost all the cooking—and everyone has their own plate.

For Wilford Marous, founder of London’s top Haitian dining spot, Grill Shack & Tiki Bar, the holidays provide a chance to spotlight a dish that’s a staple on his menu: Soup Joumou, also known as Haitian freedom soup. The pumpkin-based dish marks the liberation of Haiti from French rule in 1804—and the immediate abolition of slavery there—and has such significance that it joined the Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2021. It takes on special meaning for Marous at the holidays. 

First- and second-generation families like mine (I’m British-Ghanaian) also pay homage to our ancestors’ holiday traditions, with dishes that represent several cultural and ethnic heritages sitting side by side at Christmas dinner. Our table has classics like Yorkshire pudding and Brussels sprouts next to dishes of jollof rice and plantains. 

Maintaining holiday traditions helps these chefs, as Jackson says, feel “a little closer to home.” Hers is one of several notable ones in London that honor family roots.

Ham Hock and Stew Peas 

For most Britons, roast turkey is the centerpiece of a traditional Christmas dinner. But Dominic Taylor, chef at Good Front Room in the Langham hotel in Marylebone, says a ham is the “perfect Christmas joint” at his house. He also loves ham hock with stew peas, a holiday dish that has deep cultural significance for him because of his extended family. (Taylor, who won Channel 4’s Five Star Kitchen: Britain’s Next Great Chef, was born in Britain; his family comes from Jamaica and St. Lucia.) 

Taylor makes the meaty, fatty cut the feature in his dish of stew peas, which in the Caribbean is a classic Sunday meal. It’s made with red kidney beans, coconut milk and spinners (tasty little Jamaican dumplings). During the holidays, it might get dressed up with such pork cuts as trotters or tails.

But Taylor uses smoky, salty ham hock for the elegantly plated Jamaican menu at his restaurant. (Ham hocks are easier for him to get in London, he says, and the flavor is powerful.) The result is a refined showstopper flavored with Scotch bonnet, cinnamon and ginger. "It felt like a very special dish I would get at my great Aunt Myrtle's, who the Good Front Room is inspired by," he says.

Sorrel

For Jackson, the holidays have always been synonymous with ham, studded with cloves and festooned with pineapple slices and cherries, as well as Jamaican Christmas cake. That comes “alongside copious amounts of sorrel,” she adds. “It was really the cue that Christmas was coming.” The founder of Wood & Water restaurant and SideChick cocktail bar in Brixton remembers the refreshing, flowery sweet-tart drink as the beverage of choice during the holidays in far warmer Jamaica, where people in her neighborhood would set up elaborate Christmas lights and decorations.

All sorrel recipes differ, even within families. Jackson makes hers with fresh hibiscus flowers when she’s in Jamaica and with dried flowers when she’s not. She also adds a healthy amount of rum—she is, after all, a cocktail expert—to make it a transportive alternative to mulled wine. Apart from the holidays, Jackson puts sorrel to good use at Wood & Water as a glaze for confit duck.

Brussel Sprouts in Lardo

As a child, James Cochran’s Christmas table hosted a wide range of dishes: The chef-owner of the ambitious Islington restaurant 12:51 Kitchen is Scottish and West Indian; his mother is from Saint Vincent. He recalls his mother stocking Christmas tables with jerk pork, callaloo and plantains alongside pigs in blankets (which, in the UK, refers to bacon-wrapped sausage) and cauliflower cheese. A “real culture clash,” he remembers. Most challenging were the boiled Brussels sprouts. The vegetable is, after all, usually a contentious offering at family gatherings: Most, though not all, adults want them, and children won’t finish them.

But Cochran has figured out a way to turn them into a crowd pleaser, drawing on his childhood practice of mixing up bites of sprouts with the pigs in a blanket and cauliflower cheese on his Christmas dinner plate. Now, he smothers the sprouts in béchamel  sauce and tops it all with lardo (luscious cured pork fat) or bacon and pickled cranberries; besides being an alternative version to family staple cauliflower cheese, it also brings him a pleasant holiday flashback. Cochran likes the flavor combination, with the bitterness of the Brussels sprouts and saltiness of the lardo cutting through the richness of the sauce. 

Noël Meal, With Chicken, Peas and Onion Sauce

In Senegal, a roast turkey is usually replaced with more available and less expensive chicken—one big enough to feed family, friends and neighbors. For Khadim Mane, founder of Little Baobab, the roast bird is the focus of his Noël Meal, the main event of a dish that includes peas, potatoes and onion sauce and is served with slices of baguette.

The chicken is especially tasty because Mane first marinates it with the traditional Senegalese green sauce, called nokoss, which includes scallions, habanero, tomato paste, olive oil, bell peppers and dried Thai chilis and serves as a base to most cooking from the West African country.  

Although Mane grew up a churchgoing Christian in predominantly Muslim Dakar, he remembers Christmas as a time for his extended family and community to cook together and share the feast. “It wouldn’t matter who was Muslim or Christian, everyone would join. At lunchtime, we’d sit down together and eat from a big, round plate and enjoy the feast,” he says.

Mane wasn’t a professional chef when he arrived in the UK in 2010, but used cooking to feel connected to his homeland. Now, he’s created Little Baobab, a budding empire dedicated to soulful Senegalese food that includes a Peckham dining spot and a series of pop-up restaurants with live African music and a hot sauce line.  

Shimbra Asa Wot

Helen Mebrate, known on Instagram as Ethiopian Foodie, is the founder of Ammarech Spices, a site featuring products and recipes from her homeland. That includes components for Shimbra Asa Wot, a dish that she says holds a “special place among Ethiopia’s plant-based dishes.” The red chickpea stew is flavored with mekelesha, a spice blend that contains cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin and nutmeg as well as spiced butter. Mebrate then adds chickpea biscuits and serves the platter with Qeysir Selata (beetroot and potato salad with pickled red onion), Kik Alech (yellow split peas with mustard), Tikil Gomen be’Carrot ( sautéed cabbage with carrots), Gomen (sautéed kale with sweet red pepper) and, of course, injera, the tangy, chewy Ethiopian bread. 

Mebrate has always viewed Shimbra Asa Wot as a dish for special occasions because it requires so much work. “Big festivities usually centered around meat-based dishes,” she says. Since embracing a plant-based lifestyle, she has tweaked the recipes. For her, the dish is a “lovely reminder of the variety in Ethiopian cuisine and the joy of creating plant-based versions for special moments—without losing the tradition.” She serves it at holiday celebrations.

Soup Joumou 

Soup Joumou, or freedom soup, is a staple in Haiti served to ring in the new year and celebrate the country’s hard-fought independence. It was traditionally made with calabaza, the pumpkin-like squash that’s native to the Caribbean; enslaved Haitians prepared it for slaveowners but were not allowed to eat it until the Haitians shook off French colonial rule on Jan. 1, 1804. Now, it’s often made with pumpkin and embodies the taste of freedom in Haiti, especially on New Year’s Day.

“The soup is more significant to us because of the history behind it,” says Marous. He moved to London 15 years ago and worked as a financial analyst before opening Grill Shack & Tiki Bar London in 2019 to establish a community for Haitians in the UK. (High-profile customer Ed Sheeran’s Peru music video was shot at Grill Shack.)

Marous uses fresh ingredients for the restaurant’s soup, including the staple pumpkin, carrots and noodles. (At home, he adds beef.) On New Year's day, Marous and his family eat the soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner—which is how he celebrated the holiday in Haiti. 

Plantain Bread and Butter Pudding With Salted Caramel

Lungile Mhlanga is a dessert expert. As the founder of Treats Club in Hackney, she bakes nostalgic and indulgent made-to-order doughnuts, which became very popular during the Covid-19 pandemic. So it’s hardly surprising that she uses the holidays to showcase a dessert. She likes to pay homage to bread and butter pudding, a British classic, and has chosen to incorporate “a tried and true staple in African and Caribbean households: the humble plantain.” 

Mhlanga grew up in Hornchurch in East London, but her heritage is Zimbabwean. Her holiday repasts include some traditional English roast components, but turkey is swapped for goose, and you’ll find mac and cheese on the side. While plantains are not traditional to the southern  African country, they were a big part of her experience growing up Black and British, when she would eat plantains “at almost every family party.” For the pastry chef, plantain pudding signifies Christmas, and she makes it only during the holidays. She serves the dessert—based on jammy, overripe plantains and topped with salted caramel as a savory hit—with either hot custard or a scoop of clotted cream. It balances the intense sweetness, she says, while nodding to her UK home. 

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