“It’s beach food,” she added. “If you’re going to a lime beach [event]or after the harvest at church, if you want to celebrate anything that is quintessentially Tobagonian, you’ll eat crab and noodles.”
I was eager to try it myself, and luckily Clark and I caught six crabs using his homemade wooden boxes with doors. In the forest, he had noted some small hollows in the sandy floor: these were the dens of crabs, near a stream. As he set up the traps, squeezing mangoes plucked from a nearby tree around the burrows to lure them in, he told me that early evening is the best time to catch land crabs, when he can sometimes catch dozens at a time. time. When we returned later that evening, we found six manic crabs in the traps, which he showed me how to keep safe, avoiding their fronts, telling me that “their bites are like knives.”
To cook them, we headed to Clark’s yellow-tiled restaurant, Marguerite’s, located just off the beach in Castara, a remote Tobagonian village that prides itself on its authentic Caribbean cuisine. Marguerite’s is one of the best places to eat crab and dumpling in Tobago. Sherwin comes from a long line of chefs: his parents run one of the village’s open bakeries and two of his brothers also own restaurants. The recipe was taught to him by his grandmother, he told me, and he has enjoyed crabs since childhood.
In his yellow-painted kitchen, with pots hanging on the walls and lace curtains on the windows, Clark showed me the dough he had made for the dumplings, a mixture of cornmeal, wheat flour and water. He marinated the crabs in ginger and garlic and started the sauce by tossing in a spoonful of vegetable oil to heat up with a clove of garlic, then added curry powder mixed with a little water, which sizzled in the oil, creating a smoky flavor. . spices. Once the sauce was bubbling, Clark added the crabs and a shot of ketchup, followed by a pint of coconut milk.
