The Trinidad and Tobago bowl is the kind of dish that life doesn’t make anymore. Like the twin islands, Pelau is complex and nuanced. It is an intricate story of a meal that incorporates the culinary heritage and cooking techniques of the two most dominant ethnicities on the islands, African and East Indian. Pelau does more than just capture and reflect the cultural vibrancy of Trinbagonian life-tells of the country’s tragic and triumphant history, summing up the richness of a truly multicultural society.
Pelau is no different from other protein-rich rice dishes found around the world. Like jambalaya, biryani and paella, pelau is rice cooked with protein, aromatics and vegetables. Typically, chicken or beef is used in pelau and it is seasoned with a variety of spicy and aromatic herbs – onions, cilantro, parsley, thyme, scallions, ginger, garlic and scotch caps. This marinade provides a safe and appealing base of bright, unyielding flavors in which the other ingredients—long-grain rice, pigeon peas, root vegetables, and coconut milk—simmer.
But it is also much more than its parts. As one of Trinidad and Tobago’s unofficial national dishes (kallalo is another), pelau is a local favorite, and its widespread appeal goes beyond its delicious, tangy bite. The power of pelau is in the way its constituents give veiled visibility to almost all the constituent groups of the nation., from indigenous Amerindians (native herbs), to European colonizers (oils), to enslaved West Africans (pigeon peas), as well as forced laborers from the Indian subcontinent (rice). With a distinct island twist, pelau fuses rice preparations adored in the East with indigenous ingredients and African cooking processes that took root in the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. It manages to bridge the gap between faiths and factions, being for Trinidadians of all stripes a dish that amplifies the islands’ history.
There is no exact certainty about when pelau first burst onto the scene, but it is widely believed to have originated from polow, a rice dish popular in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, which was adapted by East Indians in pilau (being reworked anglicized pilaf). In the mid-1800s, after slavery was abolished in the Caribbean, the first group of indentured laborers from the subcontinent were brought to Trinidad and Tobago on a ship called the Fatel Razack, and their arrival gave rise to a rich and powerful Indian culture . . Like many dishes from the East that hybridized in the West Indies, pelau is a product of geographic syncretism: rice, brought from India, was cultivated in Trinidad’s fertile Caroni Swamp, and the cooking technique of charring meat in burnt sugar is a African. tradition. There are few other cuisines that carry the weight of the country’s history, and it is precisely in this wonderful diversity that pelau retains its cultural importance. But it is in the deep and distinctive taste, where the bright and bold flavors burst forth, that pelau really shows its steel. And it starts with sugar.
The essence of burnt sugar (aka browning) is the ingredient that gives pelau its unmistakable darkness—and you can’t have pelau without it. An essential ingredient in Caribbean cooking, kafta coloring harkens back to an era when sugar cane, powered by slave labor, anchored British economic interest in Trinidad and Tobago. The inclusion of coloring in pelau and many other native Caribbean dishes, such as Black Cake, moves the brutal past of plantation slavery from the periphery of memory to the forefront. As the first Prime Minister of Trinidad Dr. Eric Williams in his historical book Capitalism and Slavery“Strange that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have caused such crimes and bloodshed.”
