Creole Caribbean cuisine

Vanessa Bolosier is a champion of the food of Martinique and Guadeloupe

If ever you find yourself caught in the gnarled pincers of a crab, you will wish you had food writer and supper club host Vanessa Bolosier by your side. “I know how to escape,” she explains sagely. “You have to press their eyes and they’ll release you; growing up I had all the training, good home training.”

Bolosier grew up on French Caribbean islands Guadeloupe and Martinique, and it was her father who taught her crustacean husbandry; in the weeks before Easter they’d farm crates of live crabs in preparation for dishes of crab callaloo and crab matete (spicy rice with crabmeat). “We’d feed them not only chillies, but spring onions, garlic, thyme, and the flesh is different. It’s slightly softer. It’s tasty. You do feel the difference. It’s the same way if you feed your animals organic, beautiful grass, or you feed them grain – it won’t taste the same,” says Bolosier.

Having been based in London for the last 16 years, her cookbook – Sunshine Kitchen – came from her experience of not finding the regional variety of Caribbean food in Britain that she was raised eating. “There’s a myriad cookery books, where you can learn about food from the north or south of Italy, and that’s just one country,” says Bolosier, 37, but when it comes to Caribbean food, “generally everything is lumped together”, she adds, and often the assumption is that it’s “food that actually originates from Jamaica”.

That homogenisation, she says, is partly down to migration. “The people that migrated to the UK were people of Jamaican origin, in majority,” she explains, whereas in France, for instance, migration from French Caribbean islands has been more common, so “the food I’m talking about is the food people know; no one knows what jerk chicken is in France. No one knows what ackee is. Some of the ingredients and spices, they’re the same, but the application of them is completely different.”

Factor in access to funds and how difficult the restaurant industry can be anyway, and showcasing regional varieties gets even tougher. “Being able to educate people into coming to a restaurant [to eat] food that’s quite unfamiliar, requires the ability to sustain the business long enough for people to come and see and try it,” says Bolosier. However, she does think street food traders and supper clubs are helping move things forward – which, let’s face it, is good for anyone with taste buds.

Sunshine Kitchen shares her version of Creole Caribbean food; one that draws on the way her parents and grandparents cooked, traditional dishes from Guadeloupe and Martinique, with a few contemporary angles and tweaks that reflect her own style. Ask Bolosier to describe Guadeloupe and Martinique, and she can do it in one gleeful word: “Paradise!” Defining Caribbean Creole is trickier though. “That’s a problem because it’s Creole Caribbean, but you’ve got Creole from Louisiana, you’ve got African

Creole. So it’s all about fu- sion,” she notes. “These cultures will be beautiful; they collapse into something that makes it even more beautiful. To me, Creole is the collision of histories and migrations into a plate, with a French touch.”

As a result, the cookbook she says, doesn’t work without

the history section that precedes the recipes. “I do feel it’s very important for people to understand the sort of ambivalence that happens in the Caribbean, especially on French islands that are still very much French governed,” she explains.

“There is an ambivalence in the Caribbean, just generally, because of history that has very, very unfortunate and sad elements to it from the moment it was discovered, until probably now. But out of all of that has come such an amazing culture.”

•Su■shi■e Kitchen: Delicious Creole Recipes From The Heart Of The Caribbean by Vanessa Bolosier is published by Pavilion Books, priced £12.99. Photography by Clare Winfield. Available now.