Six months and one baby (!!!) later, we picked back up noshing at the top of the S’s. We were delighted to welcome our daughter Josephine (seen here in the arms of our guest Brenda) to a family tradition eight years and counting.
This first one is the very smallest independent country in the Western Hemisphere with just 55,000 people, yet with one of the oldest European histories with colonization beginning in the 1620s. St. Kitts and Nevis is one of three Lesser Antilles Caribbean island nations in an alphabetical row — the other two being St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines — with pretty similar cuisines, heavy on saltfish, coconut, breadfruit, and bananas. So I researched all three of them to suss out what small differences I could exaggerate to make for three distinct meals.
Upon reflection, a menu of seafood fritters, goat stew, rice pilaf and sugary coconut dessert feels like it could live on the menu in any of several dozen countries, which is a fitting reflection of how Caribbean cuisine is a synthesis of several continents’ ways of growing and cooking food.
Our guests included Suja, Melissa, Leo, Kelsey, Ashley, Cara, Brenda, Breesa, and Kristin. Most of them happened to learn about us through a Facebook group called Girls Love Travel.
Killer bee cocktail | Recipe
Several sites mention the Killer Bee, from Sunshine’s Beach Bar on Nevis, as the most distinctive drink from this diminutive country. It’s a pretty darn memorable one: when’s the last time you had black pepper in a cocktail?
There’s quite a complex flavor considering there’s no other liquor besides rum. I quite liked it, even though I think I messed up by using raw honey that sunk to the bottom of the glass rather than dissolving, so I recommend sticking to the cheap stuff for this recipe.
Were I to make it again, I would modify it by reducing the orange juice and upping the lime, to make it a bit less cloying and a bit more tart. But then it wouldn’t be a Killer Bee, I suppose!
Conch fritters | Recipe
It’s pronounced “conk,” like, “It hurts when you get conked on the head with a conch shell.” Indeed, this mollusk comes in that classically spiral shell. While it’s super common in the Caribbean, it’s a tough one to find even frozen far away, but I did find frozen periwinkle, which is also a sea snail, and I figured that since we were grinding it up to make fritters it wasn’t worth sweating too much.
I think I was right. Not having tasted a conch fritter for over a decade since I was in the Virgin Islands, I can’t say for sure, but I feel like it was right on with the sorta toothy texture and the flavor that lingered in the background so the aromatics and the crispiness took over.
Goat water | Recipe
Not a terribly appealing name — especially if you consider that some people refer to the dumplings as “droppings!” — but a tasty dish nonetheless and one found on home menus around the tiny country.
A few sources mention that this “used to be the national dish” until it was decided that it was too old-fashioned; a contest determined that stewed saltfish served with spicy plantains, coconut dumplings and seasoned breadfruit would be the replacement. Truth be told, this felt too gimmicky to me, and plus we’ll have saltfish, plantains, and breadfruit for adjacent islands’ meals.
As with most traditional (ahem!) recipes, the ingredients differ between households, so when I couldn’t easily find the breadfruit called for here, I subbed in some sweet potatoes plus some extra green papaya. Note also the gravy browning in the recipe — that’s essentially bottled thin caramel that adds some instant depth. The stew came out quite tasty, the only problem was that my estimate of how to do the dumplings (mix flour and water, drop ‘em in) was probably wrong because they were dense and gummy; I probably should have added some fat too.
Cook-up rice (aka Pelau) | Recipe
Sauté veggies, throw in meat, add rice and water, cook until done — depending on where you are in the world, that’s a pilaf, or pilau, or polo, or plov, or as it’s called here, a pelau. This recipe has a nice variety of types of vegetables, while the meaty bits are definitely a product of economy: chicken backs and salted pig tails. The pigeon peas are a distinctive touch that give some nuttiness and protein (given that there’s very little actual meat on those bones!). Unfortunately, the recipe calls for too much water, and the dish ended up pretty soft and without nearly as much flavor as the variety of ingredients would suggest. Darn!
Coconut sugar cake | Recipe
In contract to the complex yet disappointingly mild cook-up rice, this dessert was entirely unsubtle, down to the completely gratuitous red food coloring.
The recipe ingredients leave out an important ingredient, “mixed essence,” which is essentially (ha!) vanilla plus other flavors. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find it at the Caribbean market, so I substituted vanilla extract, almond extract, and orange blossom water to make a sort of approximation. And were I to make this again, I’d double the ginger and bay leaf, as the flavor really didn’t come through to the end and it would have been fun to have that savory balance. But no matter really, if you like coconut and intensely sweet things you’ll love thse. If you don’t, well, the name probably turned you off to ‘em already.