5 Trinidadian Recipes for Weeknight Cooking From Ramin Ganeshram (2024)

Wednesday Night Trinidadian is part of Epi's Wednesday Nights in America series.

Historian and cookbook author Ramin Ganeshram calls the food of Trinidad “a completely organic fusion of the cuisines of all the people” who call the island home. “There are some things that remain intact,” she says, like sada roti, made “just the way roti is made in the North of India.” There is cou-cou and fufu, direct descendants of West African cuisine. “But a lot of the rest of it is such a mix of all these things,” says Ganeshram. “That’s the beauty of Trinidadian cuisine. It shows unity in a way I wish human beings could show unity.”

Ganeshram’s father was an Indo-Trinidadian emigrant who came to the United States in 1954 and worked as a school teacher in Brooklyn, New York. “More often than not, he was the one doing the cooking [when I was growing up],” she told me recently by phone. “My mother didn’t like to cook, but my father—who had to teach himself to cook when he first moved to America—quite enjoyed it.”

In her first cookbook, Sweet Hands: Island Cooking From Trinidad and Tobago, Ganeshram recounts a story of her father’s early days in New York, which she told me again over the phone. Longing for a taste of home and without the skills to start from scratch, she says he “would buy knishes [an Ashkenazi Jewish pastry often filled with potato] from a street vendor, cut them in half, douse them in pepper sauce, and pretend they were aloo pie—a very spicy Trinidadian fried potato turnover.”

He lived with his Afro-Trinidadian godmother, who, Ganeshram says, taught him how to cook a few dishes. Other things he learned by trial and error, or by writing home to ask his sisters how to make something like roti. Instead of strict recipes, they wrote back “well, you just add a little of this and a little of that.” He faced a steep learning curve.

Ganeshram grew up in the 1970s and ’80s. She says “it was very common at the time to think you had to try and adopt and adapt and eat ‘American foods’ and ‘be American’—even in New York.” So while there may have been meatloaf on the dinner table as often as there was curry, her father regularly had a pot of dal on the stove ready to be served with rice. For breakfast, he often made buljol—a salad of salt cod, tomatoes, and onions—or bake, a baking-powder dough that’s usually fried and frequently stuffed with shark or other fish. And, although Ganeshram admits that her father never fully mastered the technique, there was always roti.

These days, Ganeshram cooks some Trinidadian dishes using the same simple preparations she learned from her father. Other dishes follow the techniques she picked up by observing her aunts, who she says were “phenomenal cooks,” on regular summer-long trips to Trinidad. And still others she’s made her own, adapted to suit her preferences. Below, you’ll find five Trinidadian dinners Ganeshram would happily eat on any given Wednesday—or for that matter, any night of the week.

1. Pelau With Chicken and Pigeon Peas

“I feel like pelau is the true national dish of Trinidad,” says Ganeshram. “Not because it’s more popular than callaloo or doubles, but because it’s representative of the various cultural influences that make up the island.” It’s a layered rice dish that borrows from the traditions of “East Indian biryani and West African jollof rice, and has a little bit of Chinese influence too.”

To make Ganeshram’s version, start by caramelizing white or brown sugar until it’s very dark. Next, add whole pieces of chicken, which will begin to sear as they also stop the caramel from burning. Some people add a bit of Trinidad curry powder (more on that below) with the garlic and onions that go in at this point; Ganeshram just uses a few sprigs of thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf along with coconut milk and green seasoning—an herb purée with influences from mountain-dwelling indigenous farmers and the colonial Spanish. Today green seasoning is used throughout Trinidadian cuisine, most notably in a style of smoking meat colloquially known as buccaneer cooking, named for pirates who Ganeshram says “learned to cure meat from the native islanders” and were known to use those methods when on the run. (If you don’t care to make green seasoning yourself, Matouk’s and Chief are popular brands sold by the bottle in Trinidad.)

Ganeshram next adds chopped carrots and scallions followed by winter squash, fresh chile, rinsed rice, and pigeon peas. Ketchup, which adds a tangy, sweet-and-savory undercurrent to the dish, goes in last. Ganeshram notes that if you want to get closer to the way the dish tastes in Trinidad, you should add about 1 teaspoon sugar to the ketchup, since “Trinidadian ketchup is sweeter [than brands typically found in the States], and the sugar you add at the beginning fundamentally doesn’t taste that sweet once it’s so deeply caramelized.”

The resulting dish is slightly more dense than a biryani or pilaf—Ganeshram calls it “wetter”—and sort of sticky, the rice having absorbed the mixture of caramel and coconut. The chicken soaks in that flavor too, and practically shreds as you dig the bone-in pieces out of the blanket of rice and vegetables.

2. Spicy Coconut Pumpkin Soup

“Trinidadians eat a lot of soup,” says Ganeshram, “and pumpkin is really common.” She says she loves to make this soup in the fall when really good squash is plentiful. “If calabaza isn’t available,” she notes, “Cinderella pumpkins are great for it.”

Ganeshram tends to make the soup in big batches and says it freezes exceptionally well. She also likes that the soup is adaptable. “The recipe calls for chicken stock, but you could use vegetable stock [or water] if you want it to be vegan. If you like a very thin soup you could add more stock, or if you wanted something thicker and more filling, add less.”

A thinner version is the regular first course at her family’s Thanksgiving dinner, and she often adds a bit of green seasoning—1 or 2 teaspoons—just after sautéing the onions to give the starter a more robust flavor.

For coconut milk, Ganeshram likes Native Forest—though she says she usually grabs the brand’s coconut cream instead of coconut milk. She clarifies that “it's just coconut milk with less water,” and that she finds it a more satisfying source of creamy, bold coconut flavor. Plus, she notes, “you can always dilute it.”

The spice in this soup comes from ají dulce, a chile that’s not as hot as it appears. “They look just like Scotch bonnets, but they’re only mildly spicy” Ganeshram says, noting that in Trinidad they’re just called seasoning peppers. If you can’t find the ají dulce, substitute fresh pimiento or cherry peppers, which have comparable levels of sweetness and heat. And if you don’t have any fresh chiles on hand, Ganeshram says you could sprinkle in a bit of medium-to-hot paprika to taste.

3. Shrimp Creole

In Trinidad, Ganeshram says, Creole food refers to “anything with underlying European [specifically Spanish or French] influence”—a vestige of the colonial era. These dishes usually feature a combination of tomatoes, onions, and garlic.

The recipe below, which comes from a 1996 issue of Gourmet magazine, isn’t strictly Trinidadian, though: its preparation is similar to versions made across Creole communities in the Americas. To give it a Trinidadian touch, Ganeshram first marinates the shrimp in green seasoning: Just toss peeled and deveined shrimp with one tablespoon green seasoning per pound and refrigerate for about one hour before you plan to start cooking.

From there, her recipe and Gourmet’s follow suit: Sauté onions, bell peppers, celery, and garlic, add canned tomatoes and a few spices. (Here, Gourmet adds a bit of chicken broth. Ganeshram skips it, which just means her recipe takes less time to reduce.) Ganeshram adds a few dashes of Trinidadian hot pepper sauce before stirring in the marinated shrimp and simmering until the seafood is just cooked through.

The dish is usually served over rice. In Ganeshram’s house that means basmati, but she says that has nothing to do with being Indo-Trinidadian (her mother, who was born in Iran, preferred basmati and passed the preference on to her). “The East Indians who arrived in Trinidad [in the mid-to-late 19th century] as indentured laborers came from regions in Northern India—such as Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.” And while they “would have eaten Himalayan basmati,” Ganeshram says, today the rice more often consumed in Trinidad is either “short-grain white rice or a long-grain rice similar to Carolina rice.” The heritage grain is called Trinidad hill rice. It’s derived from a variety grown in Ivory Coast, which was transported to the Americas by enslaved Africans. The exact rice can be hard to get stateside, but there is one company currently selling Trinidad hill rice online (fair warning that shipping to the U.S. can be pricey).

4. Baigan Chokha

“There is a huge amount of vegan and vegetarian food” in Trinidad, Ganeshram tells me when talking about this next dish. The reason, she says, is, again, because of a mix of cultures. There are “a number of people of Hindu descent, as well as a [sizable] Rastafarian community [both religions with a vegetarian tradition]. The Chinese laborers who came to Trinidad prior to the East Indians also brought a canon of vegetarian dishes.”

So, while she says “the name of this dish is Hindi—baigan being the word for ‘eggplant’ and chokha meaning a category of ‘charred and mashed foods’”—she notes that the method of cooking is common in both West African and East Indian culinary traditions. She also says that, though “some people say Indian food in Trinidad is very close to subcontinental food, it really isn’t true,” since it’s been adapted to fit the ingredients, preferences, and influences on the island.

The key to making this dish, Ganeshram says, is that “the [whole] eggplants must be charred, charred, charred black; deflated to the point where you wonder if there’s anything left inside the eggplant to eat.” In the summer she does this on the grill, otherwise the broiler works well. Once cool enough to handle, she cuts the eggplants open and scoops the silky, caramelized flesh into a bowl. (The burnt skins are discarded.) She then sautés onions, garlic, and tomato and folds that into the eggplant, which barely needs to be mashed if it’s been cooked to the point stated above. Cilantro goes in last, but if you have some of that green seasoning on hand, you can add a bit of that too.

Ganeshram usually eats baigan chokha with paratha roti, but says you could spoon it over rice or scoop it up with bake. And if you want to slather it over toasted sliced bread, that’s good too.

5. Curried Chicken

“West Indian curry is different from the ones found in India,” explains Ganeshram. “Trinidad curry powder has a completely different flavor profile than, say, Madras curry.” While spice mixes in India tend to incorporate dried chiles, Ganeshram notes that many Trinidadians prefer to leave chile out of their curry powder, adding fresh hot chiles to the stew pot instead.

That’s how it works in Ganeshram’s father’s recipe for curried chicken, which she calls a “very simple preparation.” But before you begin, there’s a choice to make. Trinidadians often “use a cleaver to chop the chicken into bite-size pieces, every one with a splint or bone in it.” Chopping it up the traditional way “adds a lot of flavor, no doubt,” says Ganeshram, “but it’s difficult to eat—you have to get in there with your hands.” Ganeshram’s father would leave the chicken in whole pieces instead; when Ganeshram is pressed for time, she makes the dish with chunks of quick-cooking boneless chicken breast. You can tailor your choice to the time you’ve got: Make the fastest version possible (Ganeshram’s boneless weeknight go-to), the tastiest version possible (hacked up with the bones), or something in between (her father’s).

No matter which you choose, there’s a step Ganeshram says you definitely cannot skip: “You have to fry the curry powder before you add the meat and liquid. It has to be heated, otherwise the flavor won’t be released.” To do it, she combines the curry powder with a small amount of water to make a paste (this prevents the powder from scorching) and then drops the paste into hot oil, stirring with onions until the aromas are released. Chicken that’s been rinsed with lime juice and marinated in green seasoning with Scotch bonnet chiles and garlic goes in next, followed by water or stock, and that’s it. The chicken simmers until it’s tender and then is spooned over rice or is eaten with buss up shut.

“Trinidadians will curry anything,” says Ganeshram, “but curry chicken is the standard everyday dinner dish. It’s the quickest, easiest thing somebody would make on a weeknight. My father made it at least once a week.” Curry chicken is so popular, in fact, that Ganeshram says you just have to listen to Calypso—a style of folk music that originated in Trinidad—to understand the significance chicken has for the populace. If you listen to the lyrics, which frequently include observations about current events, she says, “in every decade (and practically every year), there’s a Calypso where part of the complaint about the era is that chicken prices are going up.”

If it’s an expensive chicken year wherever you are, just scroll back up. The baigan chokha, Ganeshram points out, “is very cheap to make.”