THE BARBECUE OF CRADLE

CELEBRATING THE ROOTS AND EVOLUTION OF CARIBBEAN BARBECUE

- KAYLA STEWART

IN THE CARIBBEAN, low-and-slow cooking rooted in the expansive power of smoke is the hallmark of really good barbecue.

That's according to Ramin Ganeshram, journalist, chef, and author of the cookbook Sweet Hands: Island Cooking from Trinidad & Tobago. Smoke carries the aromas of cooking meat and the earthy, warming flavors of allspice. It interlaces with the bright flavors and tender bite of vinegar-marinated escovitch fish; it wraps its arms around friends and families gathering by a fire. The Caribbean is the keeper of one of the world's oldest barbecuing traditions, and smoke has always been at the heart of it.

Most food scholars say that the Taino, an Indigenous people who inhabited various Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, were responsible for creating the first documented examples of the cooking technique we now call barbecue. The Taino people had a system: They'd dig a firepit and make a grate of green wood lashed with fibers, says Ganeshram. They started a slow fire in the firepit, placed the meat to be cooked on the wood frame above a slow fire, and called the process barabicu, which means "sacred pit." European colonizers were the first to document some of these traditions, observing Indigenous people slowly cooking fish, vegetables, and iguanas (a delicacy) on raised platforms above smoldering fires. The Taino word barabicu gave rise to the Spanish term barbacoa, which eventually made its way into English as barbecue.