 Notting Hill Carnival, held each year over the August bank holiday weekend in London's Notting Hill, is a huge, colourful, vibrant street festival. It began as a small street party back in the 1960s. It was organised by mainly Trinidadian immigrants who wanted to bring the local community together. From its modest beginnings, the Carnival has flourished. Like other festivals started by Caribbean immigrants, such as Caribana in Toronto and the Labor Day celebration in Brooklyn, New York, it's a major showpiece for West Indian culture. It's characterised by pulsating soca beats, melodious and infectious rhythms of steel bands, intricately made costumes and the flavoursome food that can be found at virtually every corner along the Carnival route.
 there's a lot more to Caribbean cuisine than jerk chicken
Most popular among that food is spicy jerk chicken, a Jamaican dish that, for many people, sums up the true flavour of the Caribbean. But ask any West Indian and they'll tell you that there's a lot more to Caribbean cuisine than jerk chicken. The roots of Caribbean food The Caribbean is an extremely diverse region with a culture built on many influences, from the indigenous Caribs to French, Spanish, Dutch and British colonisers, enslaved African people and indentured Indians and Chinese. Although the cuisine is an amalgam of all these influences, it's clear that across most of the region the strongest influence on Caribbean cuisine has been that of the enslaved African people. The best example of this influence is in fact, jerk.
Jerking is a traditional Jamaican way of curing meat using a variety of spices. It's a process that was invented by the Maroons, freed African slaves who lived in the inhospitable mountains of Jamaica and fought the British to resist capture. African influencesAfricans had to be quite inventive, as they usually had to make do with the remnants of food from the plantation owners. As a result, dishes such as cow heel soup, pig-foot souse (slow-cooked pigs' feet pickled in a mixture of lemon juice, cucumbers, peppers and coriander) and breadfruit oil-down (breadfruit cooked with coconut milk, salted meat and herbs) are now commonplace across the region.
Indian influencesIndians first arrived in the Caribbean as indentured labourers in the 1830s. They were mainly from around Calcutta and the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and, as Madhur Jaffrey notes in her Ultimate Curry Bible, "the Indian foods of Trinidad and Guyana are based on fully or half-remembered, 19th-century recipes from [their native] villages worked out as best as possible with the ingredients at hand".
It's said that Indian women travelled with seeds for some of the essential food plants in their ears. When these seeds were planted in their new homes, the fruit of these plants formed the basis of Indo-Caribbean cuisine. Favourite foods The most popular Indo-Caribbean dish is the roti, a kind of flatbread that’s usually served like a wrap, with fillings such as curried potatoes, channa (chickpeas), meat or seafood. The most popular roti is the dhalpourie (or dhalpouri) roti, which is stuffed with ground split peas, or dhal.
The Indians also created Trinidad's favourite street food, doubles, so named because it’s made out of two rounds of fried dough. The fried dough is sometimes referred to as 'bara' and is filled with curried chickpeas and bathed in a hot chilli sauce. Other popular accompaniments for doubles include chadon beni sauce (made from a herb that tastes like a strong variety of coriander), tamarind chutney and cucumber chutney. 'Hybrid' cuisinesWith such ethnic and cultural diversity in the region, it isn't surprising that there are many hybrid cuisines in the Caribbean. Take Cuban-Chinese cuisine, for example. The origins of Cuban-Chinese cuisine go back to the late 1800s, when Chinese men arrived in Latin America, having been excluded from the US by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
 In Latin America, Chinese immigrants discovered a range of new ingredients, to which they applied traditional cooking techniques, such as stir-frying. In the process, they created Cuban-Chinese cuisine, including such multi-layered hybrids as black beans and Spanish yellow rice with chow mein. Meanwhile, in Curacao, Aruba and Bonaire, which have been under Dutch rule since the early 19th century, you'll find keshi yena, which literally means 'stuffed cheese'. This dish was reputedly created on a Dutch plantation in Curacao and is made by stuffing the discarded rinds of Edam cheese with spicy minced meat, olives and capers. Essential ingredientsEssentially, Caribbean food revolves around fresh produce, lots of herbs and a large dose of inventiveness. In the Caribbean, fish, such as flying fish, grouper, snapper, shark and kingfish, are abundant and these will be found on most restaurant menus.
 In the markets, sweet mangoes and papayas, root vegetables such as yams, eddoes, sweet potatoes and cassava, as well as vegetables such as breadfruit, green bananas, pumpkins, chayote (also called christophene or cho cho) and ackee (a yellow tree fruit that has the texture and flavour of scrambled eggs) are relatively cheap and form the basis of a wide variety of dishes. There's a commonly held belief that Caribbean food is spicy and, while some popular dishes (like jerk) are spicy, Caribbean cooks tend to use a mixture of herbs and spices, such as coriander, parsley, chives, thyme, allspice and garlic. A common practice in Caribbean homes is to make green seasoning, a fine blend of all the herbs mentioned above, which is used as a basic marinade for meat and fish or as a seasoning for soups and stews. Caribbean food in the UK When you find the good stuff, the food found at the Notting Hill Carnival is every bit as authentic as the street food found in the Caribbean. Jerk chicken is just about everywhere, and you'll easily find doubles and roti, too. You may also find shark and bake, a popular Trinidadian snack. Bake is lightly leavened bread that's either baked or fried. The shark is usually accompanied with chutneys - tamarind, garlic and coriander, for example. You can wash the food down with a variety of alcoholic punches such as peanut punch, Irish moss and Guinness punch. And if you want something stronger, there's sure to be some good Caribbean rum on offer. RecipesIf you want to enter the Carnival spirit but can't make it to Notting Hill, try your hand at cooking Caribbean food at home with these recipes: Chicken and meat
Fish
Veggies and sides
Sweet things
Party drinks
|
|
|
