The Remarkable Variety of Caribbean Cornmeal

In Caribbean dining establishments throughout The united states, patrons have turn out to be accustomed to common dishes this kind of as jerk hen, beef patties, and oxtail. The warmth and vibrance of Caribbean foodstuff has made a splash stateside, but some of the more residence-design, foundational dishes are nevertheless having difficulties to gain interest in the restaurant space.

Fungi—pronounced “foon-ji,” with no relation to mushrooms—is a person of them. A staple Caribbean cornmeal dish flaked with okra and laced with butter can be discovered in the course of the islands, specifically in the West Indies and Virgin Islands. The thickened, earthy porridge-like dish has roots in slavery itself, and is a single of numerous dishes that demonstrates the relevance of cornmeal in Caribbean foodways.

A staple with pseudonyms

Ramin Ganeshram, a journalist, food stuff author, qualified chef, and government director of Connecticut’s Westport Museum for Background and Tradition, describes, “We connect with [fungi] cou cou [sometimes written as “coo coo”] in Trinidad, and it is really termed diverse things in unique components of the Caribbean.”

Ganeshram is a multiracial American with Trinidadian heritage who has invested her occupation focusing on the colonial and early federal foodways of African Americans and mixed race individuals, with a emphasis in the Caribbean. (She also authored a book about Hercules, George Washington’s enslaved, talented Black chef).

She explained that cornmeal-primarily based fungi will take a selection of styles across the Caribbean local community. Her to start with memory consuming the cornmeal is the way it is continue to cooked in Trinidad: with okra. It is molded into a cake-like or molded figure or some type, then sliced and eaten with any kind of stewed dish.

“Corntastic” cornmeal

Ganeshram went on to say that cornmeal by itself tends to make cameos in various guises throughout the Caribbean, and that the variety of cooked cornmeal demonstrates the array of Caribbean foodways. Further than fungi and cou cou, it’s also used for pastelles, which are equivalent to tamales stuffed with seasoned meats, wrapped in banana leaves, and steamed. (Tamales and pastelles are various from Puerto Rican pasteles, which have a plantain–green banana mash base.) On the islands, it is also typical to see cornmeal put together with flour to make Caribbean dumplings.

“The Caribbean is normally viewed as this monolith to Us residents,” states Ganeshram. “They think that Caribbean food items is the exact same, and all Caribbean accents are the exact same, and nevertheless we see these outstanding distinctions from island to island.”

Queens indigenous Brittney “Stikxz” Williams agrees. The non-public chef and caterer describes fungi as a thing that is a lot more prevalent in the Virgin Islands and Barbados. In her Jamaican family rising up, nevertheless, her household ate cornmeal in the kind of a slightly sweetened porridge. The chef recalls finding out as a young woman that the porridge experienced been thought of a type of sustenance for generations.

“It was something that was always eaten for breakfast to sustain [you] hunger, specifically for those people rising up on farmland [who] had been responsible for attending to the land,” she stated.

Ganeshram suggests this can be traced to slavery. Through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Africans who ended up brought to the Central American islands introduced cornmeal-based dishes this sort of as fungi. These dishes–and Caribbean food stuff in general–were deemed “poor man’s food”: foods that could hold bodily laborers shifting at an cheap selling price.

A cuisine over and above jerk rooster

Recognizing the much more unassuming dishes within just Caribbean cuisine gives men and women the possibility to flavor crucial Caribbean heritage and society, suggests Ganeshram, who has experimented with for many years to change the narrative about what island cuisine is about.

“The foodways are a way to get to that story, and get to that truth of the matter, and get to that generations-extensive, systemic oppression in a way that people can quite literally digest,” she states.

Chef Williams is furthermore keen to convey fungi and related cornmeal dishes to the Caribbean delicacies tale, saying that it is rarely given comprehensive awareness and credit rating in restaurant configurations. She’s tried using to counter the idea that cornmeal simply cannot be utilised in resourceful or refined Caribbean dining (polenta, for illustration, seems on some of the very best Italian menus in the nation), and incorporates cornmeal in her menus.

“I enjoy to introduce cornmeal at my dinners any time I [have] several programs, or everything of that form, for the reason that I want anyone to seriously comprehend the gravity [of cornmeal] and how impactful every of these particular elements hold true to West Indian tradition, and to the Caribbean diaspora,” reported Williams.

Ganeshram applauded initiatives from culinary figures like chef Williams to aid the kaleidoscope of Caribbean cuisine attain the identical stage of respect as other, more Eurocentric cuisines. (What is polenta, following all, if not Italy’s edition of fungi?)

“I’ve been writing about this food stuff for 20 decades,” said Ganeshram. “My wrestle, as a person of Caribbean descent, who’s a chef and a foods author, is that I’ve invested literally a long time attempting to convince editors that Caribbean food stuff is useful, that folks care about it, that it truly is attention-grabbing, and that it’s delectable.”