CARIBBEAN TWIST ON VEGAN
Sauces, herbs create distinct flavours
“The secret is in our sauces,” Barbadian chef and food scientist Taymer Mason says with a laugh.
In her cookbook, Caribbean Vegan (The Experiment, 2016), the Toronto-based author shares recipes for more than 200 West Indian favourites.
She credits wet spice blends and sauces for the “distinct flavour notes” in Island food, and opens the collection with seasonings, gravies, chutneys, pickles and other condiments.
Just a drizzle of sauce chien (French Creole for “dogfish sauce”), for example, can add a new dimension to soups, burgers, plantains, rice dishes and root vegetables, including fries.
Mason says that cooking Caribbean-style can be as straightforward as using familiar herbs and spices in different ways.
She first started veganizing Island classics while living in France for nearly a decade. “I felt there was an absence of Caribbean culture … and I was just missing the taste of home. So I started to recreate all of these recipes and that’s how Caribbean Vegan was born,” Mason says.
There are traditional and modern interpretations in the book, with dishes spanning the region: her grandmother’s Saint Lucian bakes (“a Caribbean version of English muffins”); Barbadian-style pelau (one-pot rice dish); Guyanese mango chow (spicy fruit salad); and Trinidadian doubles (recipe follows).
Each nation in the Caribbean has diverse cultural influences, and Mason touches on the area’s multilayered culinary history in the book.
These range from Chinese and Indian cuisines introduced by indentured servants, and African cuisines such as Ghanaian that came during the slave trade, to the foods of major colonial powers (Spain, France and England).
“There’s always a common ground in Caribbean food. It’s not isolated. It’s mixed with Asian, European and African cuisines. It touches everybody,” Mason says.
“Caribbean food hasn’t been respected enough. It has been reduced to jerk, pineapples and coconuts but there’s so much more.”