Cuisines
Caribbean recipes
Allspice, scotch bonnet, and slow heat.
Caribbean cooking is the food of forced and voluntary migration on a scale that shows in every dish: West African technique, Indigenous ingredients, Spanish, French, British and Dutch colonial imposition, and indentured South Asian labour, layered on islands close enough to trade and far enough apart to diverge. Scotch bonnet, allspice, thyme and ginger are the common thread; rum is the other. What the tradition does better than almost any other is the marinade — long, wet, aromatic, and doing structural work rather than surface flavouring. The recipes here name the island where a dish belongs, because a Jamaican and a Trinidadian version of the same thing are usually different dishes, and the rum drinks are treated as seriously as the food.
22 recipes
Painkiller
Dark rum with pineapple, orange and coconut cream, shaken rather than blended, and finished with far more grated nutmeg than seems reasonable.
Jerk Chicken
Chicken marinated overnight in scotch bonnet, allspice and thyme, then cooked slowly over smoke until the skin is lacquered almost black.
Daiquiri
Three ingredients and nowhere to hide: white rum, lime and sugar, shaken hard and drunk cold and straight up.
Ackee and Saltfish
Salt cod soaked and flaked into sautéed onion and pepper, then folded through ackee at the very last moment so it does not break up.
Caribbean Rum Punch
A jug punch on the old sour-sweet-strong-weak ratio, spiced with nutmeg and Angostura and made to sit on a table rather than a bar.
Rice and Peas
Rice cooked in coconut milk with kidney beans, thyme and a whole scotch bonnet left in the pot and never broken.
Piña Colada
Rum, pineapple and coconut cream blended with ice until thick enough to hold a straw upright.
Mojito
Mint pressed rather than pounded, with white rum, lime and soda over crushed ice, so it tastes of the leaf and not of the stalk.
Grilled Pineapple with Rum Syrup
Pineapple wedges charred over high heat and spooned with a dark rum, lime and brown sugar syrup reduced until it just coats.
Fried Plantain
Very ripe plantain sliced on the diagonal and fried until the sugars caramelise at the edges and the middle goes to custard.
Festival
Slightly sweet cornmeal dumplings rolled long, fried until crisp outside and cakey within, and eaten with anything fried or jerked.
Escovitch Fish
Whole fish fried until the skin shatters, then dressed hot with vinegar, onion, carrot and scotch bonnet so it pickles as it cools.
Curry Goat
Goat shoulder burned into curry powder and then cooked for two hours, until the meat gives and the sauce is thick enough to coat rice.
Conch Fritters
Chopped conch in a loose batter with sweet pepper and scotch bonnet, dropped into hot oil and eaten standing up with a squeeze of lime.
Brown Stew Fish
Fried whole fish simmered briefly in a dark sweet-savoury gravy built on browning, onion and thyme, and served with the sauce spooned over.
Ti' Punch
Rhum agricole, cane syrup and a squeezed disc of lime, served without ice and mixed by the person drinking it.
Rum Swizzle
Two rums, two juices and bitters churned with crushed ice until the glass frosts and the drink turns cloudy and cold.
Planter's Punch
One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak — the old rhyme, built on dark Jamaican rum and drunk long over ice.
Frozen Strawberry Daiquiri
White rum, lime and frozen strawberries blended to a thick slush that holds a straw upright.
Frozen Melon Colada
White rum, melon liqueur, pineapple and coconut blended into a thick pale-green frozen cocktail with a clean lime finish.
Dark and Stormy
Ginger beer and lime with dark rum floated on top, so the first sip is rum and the last is ginger.
Bahama Mama
Two rums with coconut, pineapple and grenadine, shaken and poured tall over ice so the red sinks through it.