Creole cooking
In T&T culinary terms, Creole refers to African-style cooking which has picked up many other influences along the way. Often served with coleslaw and a slice of zaboca (avocado), pelau is a classically Creole chicken dish, utilizing the “browning down” tradition of caramelizing meat in burnt brown sugar. Rice, pigeon peas, garlic, onions and pumpkin are then added and cooked down in coconut milk to delicious effect.
Browning is also used to make traditional Sunday lunch of baked chicken, usually served with rice, stewed peas, macaroni or potato pie and potato, pasta or green fig (banana) salad. Another Creole staple is callaloo: chopped dasheen leaves cooked with okra, pumpkin, coconut milk and occasionally crab meat, into a tasty, pleasantly slimy mixture that’s sometimes puréed. It’s often served with coocoo, a kind of cornmeal polenta flavoured with okra. Two dishes not for the squeamish are the highly spiced local black pudding, and souse, pigs’ or chickens’ feet marinated in lime juice and peppers, and served cold. A classic accompaniment to main meals is oil down: vegetables (particularly breadfruit or cassava) stewed in coconut milk and flavoured with pig tail.
Though increasingly rare these days, “wild meat” such as iguana, agouti, lappe, manicou, tattoo and quenk are considered a delicacy, and end up in the pot where available. Though a 2013–2015 hunting ban made it temporarily illegal to kill, eat or sell wild meat, it was still sold illicitly throughout the banned period; and though you could theoretically try it once the hunting season is reinstated, as it’s slated to be in 2015, you might bear in mind that as many of these animals are endangered, it’s more ethical to steer well clear.
Creole soups include corn soup; san coche, a lentil soup cooked with pig tail; and cow-heel soup, thick with split peas and slowly cooked meat. Fish broth is a thin and delicious fortifying soup padded out with boiled green bananas and dumplings, while pacro water is similar but substitutes pacro (a mollusc known as chip-chip in Trinidad) for fish, and is touted as a strong aphrodisiac. Soups made from pumpkin, callaloo or pulses (red peas, black-eyed peas etc), often flavoured with pig tail, are also classic Creole creations.
Seafood is extremely popular and unfailingly good: from thick steaks of dense and delicious kingfish, grouper, tuna, cavalli, carite, barracuda and mahi-mahi/dolphin (the fish also known as “dorado”, not the mammal), to smaller fillets of “red fish”: moonshine, snapper, parrotfish, flying fish and tilapia. (Note that of these, mahi-mahi, flying fish, carite and tilapia are the most sustainable choices.) Creole-style fish is usually fried or stewed in a peppery tomato-based marinade of onion, sweet and hot peppers and garlic, while curry crab and dumplin’ (crab cooked in its shell with a coconut curry sauce and served with boiled dumplings) is a marvellous Tobago speciality. Local lobster is usually doused in a lemon, garlic or herb butter, or sometimes curried.
Indian cooking
Though the obvious staple of Indo-Trinidadian cooking is curry, the T&T version is somewhat different to that served in India, using fresh hot peppers rather than chilli paste and a blend of curry powder that’s unique to the islands. One of the most popular curry dishes is duck, which forms the centrepiece of the ever-popular Trini tradition of a “curry duck lime”. Another mainstay is the vast array of chutneys, ranging from super-sweet to tart or peppery. Sweetly curried mango or pomme cythere on the seed, peppery anchar and kucheela, a hot mango pickle, are universally plopped into rotis, doubles and aloo pies.
Roti
The unofficial national dish, roti is a stretchy flat bread (“skin”) used to wrap curried meat, vegetables or fish, a style of preparation that originated in Trinidad but is now popular across the Caribbean. There are several variations of roti skins including basic dhalpuri (with seasoned split peas layered into the dough); sada (more like a flatbread, it’s cooked on a hot griddle, usually in the early morning, and served with sauteed fresh tomato or aubergine “choka”); and buss-up-shut, a thin, tasty shredded skin that resembles a torn cloth shirt and is used to spoon up mouthfuls of curry sold in “snackboxes”. Paratha or dosti is a plain roti skin.
Roti fillings range from curried chicken and beef to conch, goat and shrimp. Most vendors include meat on the bone – if you don’t fancy sucking out the marrow as the locals do, ask for “boneless”. Common vegetarian fillings (also used to complement the meats) are channa (curried chickpeas) and potato, sweet pumpkin, bodi (green beans) and bhaji (local spinach). In a restaurant, you may be offered a bowl of peppery lentil dhal as an accompaniment.
Good roti shops abound in the capital, but most locals agree that the best roti is to be found in the Indian heartlands of Central or South Trinidad.
Fruit and vegetables
Local fruit and vegetables are plentiful and cheap, particularly if you buy from large markets. Some unusual local fruits include the super-sweet and extremely popular sapodilla, grey-brown and globular with gritty, sweet pulp, while cherry-sized chenets (also called guinep) have smooth green skin and a large seed with sweet, slightly acidic flesh. The knobbly green-and-brown skin of the soursop surrounds a delectable milky white pulp, often made into ice cream; its smaller cousin the sweetsop is less common. Look out also for the scrumptious kymet, a round, deep purple fruit with seeds that form a star shape when the fruit is cut in half. The round pomme cythere (or “pomsitae”) is sweet and yellow when ripe, but is often eaten green with salt and hot pepper as “chow” – as is the star-shaped carambola (five finger), pineapple and unripe mango.
Green-skinned with a soft, aromatic orange flesh, pawpaw (papaya) is best eaten with a squeeze of fresh lime, while bananas (often called figs – look out for the tasty, tiny finger variety or young green bananas boiled and eaten as a savoury), watermelon and pineapples are all very common. Citrus is ever popular; you’ll see lemons, limes and exceptionally sweet oranges and grapefruit, while portugals are easy-peel, thick-skinned mandarins.
Many varieties of mango grow profusely in rural areas, perfuming whole communities with the distinctive aroma of rotting fruit from April till August. The most popular (and expensive) type is the rosy, medium-sized julie, while the long stringy mango is best avoided unless you have dental floss handy.
The most frequent vegetables seen on the Creole dinner plate are boiled root vegetables (known as blue food or ground provisions) such as yam, the chewy, purple-tinted dasheen, the softer, white-coloured eddoe and cassava as well as sweet potato and regular potatoes. Dasheen leaves are cooked up with okra (ladies’ fingers) to make callaloo. You’ll also see aubergine (locally called melongene or baigan), christophenes – pear-shaped and light green with a bland, watery taste similar to marrow – green bodi string beans and breadfruit, green and thick-skinned with clothy white flesh that can be baked, boiled or fried. Plantain is a popular accompaniment, a larger, denser member of the banana family; deliciously sweet when ripe, it’s usually served fried or boiled, or as plantain chips, a healthier alterative to potato crisps.
Thanks to the Indian influence, pulses (referred to as peas) are widely used in the form of split-pea dhal; green lentils cooked with pumpkin and coconut; curried chickpeas (channa); and black-eyed peas or fresh and green pigeon peas cooked with rice and coconut milk.
Desserts and sweets
Though there are plenty of fantastic local puddings, from nutmeg-laced cassava pone to the classic black cake – a ridiculously rich, rum-soaked Christmas speciality – most restaurant dessert menus concentrate on serving international staples. Home-made ice cream is ubiquitous and delicious, however, with flavours such as cherry-sorrel or barbadine sold everywhere from street stalls to supermarkets.
As for sweets, look out for bene balls, tooth-crunching globes of sesame seeds and sugar, and coconut cake, a slab of shredded coconut boiled in sugar syrup and pink food colouring. Tamarind balls take a little getting used to, combining the tart taste of tamarind with sugar and salt, as do salt prunes (seasoned, sweet-and-sour prunes rolled in a dusty red colouring, often dropped into white rum) and red mango, which is green mango, well seasoned with spices and sugar and doused in bright red colouring. Other candies include toolum, a sticky ball of grated coconut, molasses and ginger, pawpaw balls (shredded green papaya boiled in sweet syrup and rolled in sugar) and gingery fudge, while there are hundreds of often sickly sugared and fried Indian sweets; kurma (sweet fried doughballs) are probably the most popular.
