by Laura Dunkley

Created on: July 01, 2008   Last Updated: February 25, 2010

Authentic Caribbean food depends on where you are and who is cooking. The history of Caribbean food dates back to the indiginous tribes of the pre-Columbian era and with the infusion of the Europeans the Spanish and English mostly and some French, Dutch and a smattering of Portuguese and other Europeans. Africa has made a large contribution through the importation of slaves and after the emancipation of slaves in the 1800's East Indians, Chinese and later on some Middle Easterners mostly form Lebanon and Syria.

The resultling food depends on where you are. In Trinidad and Guyana with their large East Indian populations, you will find local fare that would be just as common in your favorite Indian restaurant. This cuisine when combined with the influences of the Europeans, Africans and other Asians is authentic to the region. Not to say that the foods you find as you go north in the Windward and Leeward Islands and west to the Greater Antiles are any less authentic.

Island to island, similarities abound from the shared heritage but differences can be significant. Take Callaloo, in Jamaica it is a spinach like leaf cooked and eaten as a vegetable. In the rest of the English speaking Caribbean, it is a vegetable based soup that in Jamaica we call Pepperpot. No where else in the region eats Ackee, the national dish of Jamaica. Ackee arrived from West Africa but no other island adopted it the way the Jamaicans did.

A few years ago, Jerk hit the big time and what was once country food, available mostly in Portland became a trendy food abroad, an exotic take on barbecue. To correct others, jerk does not refer to the seasoning but to the method of cooking, an English corruption of the Spanish word charqi, for dried meat. Jerk is about as authentic as you can get for Jamaican food.

In Barbodos an authentic meal consists of flying fish and cou-cou (cornmeal with vegetables) and souse. Grenada uses cou-cou, souse and pepperpot, often adding crab. In the Bahamas conch is used in everything. Haiti speaks French but authentic Haitian food has less to do with France than Africa. It is probably the most Afro-centric food in the region. The other islands have borrowed liberally from the colonials as well as foods that were imported into the region to feed the slaves, like breadfruit which was adopted more easily on some islands than others (on some islands it was eaten and on others it was hog food).

Mix together food cultures from an amalgam of regions around the world and you have the food of a region. Asking to describe authentic Caribbean food is incorrect. As a region there are many similarities but the food from each of this islands reflects the seperate and shared cultural and regional identites from which each country arose. Rice and peas in Jamaica is different from peas and rice in Trinidad as is escovitch in Jamaica and Puerto Rico (seviche).

Ask about the authentic cuisine from each island and you will get a different article. To lump us all together is a disservice to the cooks from each and every island. I know that as a Jamaican I cook differntly from Barbados and Trinidad. Irie man.

Learn more about this author, Laura Dunkley.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.