Sara Hohn – Food… Brooklyn & Beyond

 

I have great admiration for self-published and small-run bookbooks.  In my travels, my suitcase fills up with charming and delectable cookbooks that I heft home, intending (and usually failing) to recreate the flavors of my trip.  Browsing through my favorite native cookbooks -  xeroxed, spiral bound, stapled, riddled with typos, inside jokes and painful plays on words – they are some of the most honest tellings of a cuisine, its ingredients and preparations.   Their authors, whether educators, chefs, local business owners, politicians or just good cooks, plainly contribute and compile their most loved dishes to share.  Surpassing luggage weight restrictions and overwhelming my tiny kitchen, these local cookbooks help spark my recall of culinary meanderings.

A recent trip kickstarted yet another personal cookbook microcollection – local cookbooks from Belize.  Belizean cuisine reflects widespread influences (British, African, Mayan, Caribbean, and Mexican to start) that can be found in everyday dishes, with an influx of immigrants from thoughout the world continuing to enhance and transform Belizean cuisine.  U Toucan Cook Belize starts to illustrate this culinary diversity.  On a given day in Belize, you’ll come across East Indian curries, Cuban-style ropa vieja, the age-old Mayan papaksul, English steak and kidney pie, rice and beans and the beloved cow foot soup, most of which are enjoyed with Belize’s legendary Marie Sharp’s hot sauce.  These dishes are included in U Toucan Cook Belize, which features over 100 recipes and helpful sidebars that give more detailed information on the varied food resources, such as honey, fish, herbs and fruits and vegetables found in this tropical Caribbean country.

Some dishes are instantly recognizeable: stuffed zucchini, sweet and sour pork, barbecued spareribs, tamales, pot roast, gazpacho, and steak diane (!) appear in the cookbook.  Others are unfamiliar and somewhat more exotic: deer loaf, iguana stew, ispascha (a Mayan porridge), cow foot jello, and seaweed cake.  A wonderful sounding dinner menu if I ever heard one.  There are many more crowd pleasing options, however.  A conkie is a mixture of squash, sweet potato, coconut, milk and spices wrapped in banana leaves and steamed like tamales.  Bundiga is a Garifuna dish in which green bananas, herbs and fish simmer together in coconut milk.  Also appetizing is a powerfully hot shrimp and okra gumbo served over rice.

Likewise, while Belizean cooking uses many ingredients common in the U.S., many go by multiple names which can be confusing for the non-Belizean chef.  For example, a papaya is known in Belize as a pawpaw.  A chayote goes by christophene, cho-cho, or bash.  Sorrel is sometimes called rozelle or sour-sour.  Avocado’s pseudonyms include alligator pear and zaboca.  Other fruits and vegetables used in the recipes have little or no presence in the United States such as a baboon cap, a filling fruit with light orange flesh and a “hairy” seed, or, matabooro, (aka “mankiller”) a short thick banana.

U Toucan Cook Belize is global in its influences but locally compiled by what I can only assume are some knowledgeable and dedicated Belizean cooks.  (I have yet to find any information on the publisher, Fig Tree Products). I hope to experiment sometime with dishes such as the cheesey cho-cho and hudutu baruru falumou.  I know I *can* cook Belize from here in my Brooklyn kitchen (provided I can find ingredients like iguana meat from a reputable source) but perhaps it’s best left to the experts.