As a child reared in a Trinidadian Canadian household in Toronto, Lesley Enston attended countless family feasts laden with “dishes I hated as a child (callaloo), things I loved (stewed kingfish) and everything in between.” But she knew little about their origins until she began meeting people from other Caribbean cultures around Toronto and on visits to New York City.
The more she learned, the deeper she wanted to dig into the history of her mother’s native island and its sibling nations.
Now a food writer known for her Caribbean-influenced backyard dinner parties in Brooklyn and recipes that have appeared in publications including Bon Appetit and The New York Times, Enston studies the commonalities between those diverse cultures and cuisines, as well as the nuances that make each unique.
Her findings, representing kitchens from Cuba to Puerto Rico to Trinidad, appear in “Belly Full: Exploring Caribbean Cuisine Through 11 Fundamental Ingredients” (Ten Speed Press, $32.50).
“The Caribbean is the original melting pot, and as a result, our food has a rich, though at times harrowing, narrative,” she writes in its introduction. “We all use ingredients that were introduced by Indigenous peoples, came from Africa on the same ships that brought the enslaved, or traveled from far-off lands in the hands of European colonizers.”
Eleven of those ingredients define the chapters: beans, calabaza, cassava, chayote, coconut, cornmeal, okra, plantains, rice, salted cod and Scotch bonnet peppers. Most of the recipes are unintimidating: Cala (Black-Eyed Pea Fritters) from Aruba; Cassava Pone (Cassava and Coconut Pudding) from Trinidad and Tobago; Jerk Chicken from Jamaica.
But some require significant ambition, such as Soup Joumou (Freedom Soup), a “magical” one-pot feast of oxtail, calabaza squash, root vegetables and heady spices that Haitians have been making every year for more than two centuries to celebrate their independence.
Enston urges us to think of that effort as a ritual. “With each step, with each layer, you are paying homage to a legacy of revolution, freedom, and Black excellence.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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