An Evanston Native Showcases Her Caribbean Roots on the Latest Season of 'The Great American Recipe'

The Great American Recipe airs Fridays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. 
Get more recipes, food news, and stories at wttw.com/food or by signing up for our Deep Dish newsletter. 

Growing up north of Chicago in Evanston, Brie Jamieson learned to make dishes like stew chicken from the Central American country of Belize by watching her mother and grandmother cook. She also absorbed Jamaican recipes for oxtail and more from her stepfather’s Saturday meals. Belize and Jamaica are separated only by the Caribbean Sea, and their cuisines are joined in Jamieson’s own cooking, which is featured on the fourth season of PBS’ The Great American Recipe.

She took on the role of passing on recipes herself after marrying her husband, whom she grew up alongside in Evanston. Her husband is in the military, so their family has frequently moved around the country. There was much less Caribbean food available in places like Montana and Louisiana than in Evanston – where she indulged in Jamaican food at longstanding Claire’s Korner – and Chicago’s adjacent Rogers Park neighborhood, where her stepfather once worked at the Caribbean American Bakery.

“I need my kids to also know these foods and like these foods, and we don’t live at home anymore, where it’s in abundance,” she says. To this day, her mom is her “ingredient smuggler,” bringing hard-to-find seasonings from Rogers Park Fruit Market and patties and hardough bread from the Caribbean American Bakery whenever she comes to visit.

Jamieson’s mom is also enlisted into making stew chicken, rice and beans, and potato salad, so that her granddaughters can get a taste of her cooking – and a chance to prepare food alongside her, just as Jamieson once did. “I think Grandma Kim might have me beat a little bit with my kids” in terms of her cooking, Jamieson says with a laugh. “There’s something about a grandma’s touch, which I get. I’m a grandma’s girl, too, so I can’t be too mad at them.”

But even when Grandma Kim isn’t around, Jamieson savors cooking with her daughters and getting to use the recipes as a way to share her memories of her family even as they create their own memories. “It’s one of the fun parts of parenthood, being able to pass those things down and be a kid again through your own kids.”

Sharing memories was why Jamieson started a blog: it was an easy way to update her distant family on her children. But she eventually began posting recipes on it and finding an audience, including for Caribbean recipes, which many people had struggled to reconstruct from their own memories.

“Whether you’re talking about a Jamaican person or an Italian person or a Belizean person, there are no measurements,” she says. “You were just watching grandma or mom in the kitchen throwing all the things together, and you’re like, ‘Man, how can I recreate that?’”

She still receives comments thanking her for recipes like Jamaican steamed cabbage in which people tell her, “It tastes like home.”

“That was the first boost of, ‘Oh man, this isn’t just for me,’” she says.

But she doesn’t just stick to Caribbean recipes, although those are close to her heart. She also learned Southern classics from her aunt, with whom she lived for a period. “She was the first time I remember having peach cobbler and eating banana pudding and all these things that were staples,” Jamieson says.

Her Black American roots are visible in the desserts she bakes, as well as some savory dishes that she refined particularly while living in Louisiana: red beans and rice, collard greens, crab boils.

Given Jamieson’s love of sharing recipes and memories, she thrived on the set of The Great American Recipe with the other home cooks spotlighting their cultures and backgrounds. “It was really awesome just to see people happy to showcase what makes them happy and what makes them them. And I think it was just a reminder that we are better because we are all so different.”

She particularly prizes a comment made on the show by Al Roker about her cooking. “I throw it in my husband’s face when I get a chance,” she says with glee.

It’s just another memory to be passed along to her daughters while they cook together – and for them to hold for future generations.