A PEEK INTO THE `HIDDEN' CARIBBEAN

Riaz Phillips shares recipes from lesser-known traditions and the stories behind them

Riaz Phillips has always loved eating, but making a career in food was “sort of accidental.” He started tracing the story of Caribbean culinary culture in the U.K. in the mid-2010s. Phillips's Jamaican grandmother, Mavis, had died, and he realized there were many questions he'd never asked her about her connection to the food of her homeland. Why was it so vital for her to cook these foods in England? And why did she make trips to the local market to buy fresh Caribbean fruit and vegetables to serve with dinner almost every day?

Many Caribbean shop owners in the U.K. were of Mavis's generation at that time. It occurred to Phillips that he hadn't had these conversations with his grandmother, but he could still ask them. His self-published first book, Belly Full (2017), documented the stories of more than 60 Caribbean chefs, bakers, butchers and other food shop owners in the U.K. Though he grew up eating Caribbean food, the project inspired him to learn more about the region's cuisines.

“It lit the fire for me to want to go and explore the Caribbean in more detail,” says Phillips, an award-winning writer and documentary maker who divides his time between his hometown of London and Berlin. “Through them, I had this passion to want to know more for myself. A lot of the people I spoke to in the shops spoke about how it was important for them to keep their heritage and culture alive in their family and for the next generation. I realized that, actually, I would have to play quite an active role in that for myself and my own family. It wouldn't be something that would just magically, passively happen. If I wanted these foods and this thing to be something that existed in my family, I'd have to keep it going myself.”

In August 2022, Phillips followed Belly Full with West Winds (DK), focusing on Jamaican cuisine. Its companion, East Winds (DK), centring on recipes from the lesser-known “hidden” Caribbean, was published in October 2023. He had always intended to tell the story of Caribbean foodways in two parts, writing the books simultaneously in many ways, noting the similarities and differences between the regions as he went along.

While Phillips's research for West Winds involved spending time in Jamaica, for East Winds, he took trips to Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname. For practical and experiential reasons, he usually made stops in North America. The flights were often cheaper than flying directly to the Caribbean from England. But these side trips also allowed him to experience diasporic life in places such as South and Central Florida, New York and Toronto.

“When you speak to Caribbean people, they always have family pretty much in all those places,” says Phillips. “And then that was another way of getting to know and explore the food culture and also see how it might have deviated in different diasporic places.”

In the Caribbean, plant-based eating goes back centuries. And in the countries where people in the Caribbean came from, such as China and India, it stretches back even further, says Phillips. He found that unearthing the histories of these foods was one of the most pivotal parts of writing East Winds.

“It's one thing for people to know that there are Indian people in the Caribbean. It's another thing to understand why they got there and how they ended up there,” he said. “When you read deeply into it, it's not this insular history that happened in a vacuum. There's a strong governmental overtone from places like Britain and America and Canada, who had a huge hand in playing with this human movement of people. And so, I always like to emphasize that this isn't in a box of Caribbean history or Black British history or Black History Month or Southeast Asian Month. It's just history.”