CARIBBEAN SCENES:
Ainsley shares his foodie adventures
AINSLEY HARRIOTT is as jovial and excitable as any Nineties kid will remember from his days presenting classics, Ready, Steady, Cook and Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook. The London-born chef is back on screens with a new ITV food/travel series and accompanying cookbook of the same name – Ainsley’s Caribbean Kitchen – which sees him visit Barbados, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Antigua, Grenada, Dominica, Trinidad & Tobago, which are all, he says, “so close to my heart”.
“I very much consider myself British,” the 62-year-old explains, but his Jamaican heritage is massively significant to him. “It’s where your parents come from,” he muses, “and as you get a little bit older, we all get drawn back a bit, there’s that sort of reconnection.” The Caribbean, he adds – where his mother and father were both born – “had that pull for me”.
As a region though, however disparate the Caribbean might be, sprawled across the ocean in bite-sized tropical pieces, it’s often lumped into one: One climate (hot and sunny); one cuisine (jerk chicken, rice and peas, goat curry) – but that ignores the nuances, says Ainsley.
“Every island you go to, the people have their own personality, their own way of cooking things, and they’re very proud of it,” he explains.
That said, certain ingredients are ubiquitous. Staple items, like yams, sweet potato and cassava are used in countless dishes and are thought to be the secret to many islanders’ longevity; there are more centenarians living in Dominica than anywhere else in the world (“I was interviewing a 102-yearold woman and her 104-year-old sister came to visit – it blows you away!”).
The pace of life is something shared too – and is something we ought to take more note of, says Ainsley. “They do teach us something,” says the prolific food writer, “you have to be slow in heat like that. I tell you what, we are too hectic, we really are rushing around.”
Sometimes, however, you can be too tortoise-like – especially when it comes to mango season. “Off the beaten track – I wasn’t at the posh hotels [where you can get out-of-season produce] – I’d say, ‘Can I have a couple of mangoes?’ And they’d say, ‘Too late’. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Two weeks, too late – mango already drop from the tree!’”
Ainsley calls the food he’s created for the book – such as Tobago curried crab, chargrilled watermelon with slaw, plaintain and chickpea hotcakes – “nice and casual, not too intricate.”
He first visited the Caribbean aged eight with his family.
“I remember going to see my granddad and asking him for some money to go buy a Coca Cola,” he recalls, before putting on his granddad’s Jamaican accent: “’Go on, pick two or three fresh limes from the tree, mix them with sugar, ice and water’ – that was my first experience of fresh lemonade, literally picking limes from the tree, squeezing out the juice, adding shavings of ice.
“By the time we left, there wasn’t a lime left on the tree – it was fantastic!”
Fresh mangoes and pineapple, tamarind pulped into snacks, genips (Spanish limes) and guava made a huge impact on the young Ainsley.
“When I got back to the UK, I didn’t want Fruit Salads or Black Jacks anymore,” he recalls raucously. “We craved the natural stuff.”
■ Ainsley’s Caribbean Kitchen by Ainsley Harriott, photography by Dan Jones, is published by Ebury Press, priced £20. Ainsley’s Caribbean Kitchen is on ITV, Mondays at 8pm (Tuesday, 11.15pm, ITV Wales)