A new perspective on Caribbean cooking - includes recipes - Christopher Idone's book 'Cooking Carib' written with Helen McEachrene

American Visions, June-July, 1993 by Joanne Harris

It's a curious stew of politics and food that Helen McEachrene concocts, as the conversation turns from embracing cultures to shattering ethnic boundaries to her adventures in Tokyo. This trilingual woman with the painted face, polished nails and British accent is opinionated, politically astute and nationalistic. Some say she should be a politician. others applaud her work with former president Luis Echeverria Alvarez of Mexico. Everyone loves her food.

She was at a dinner party cooking callaloo and crabs, stewed chicken, and pigeon peas with rice for a friend's birthday when she met cookbook author Christopher Idone. "He just loved the food. We got to talking, and we liked each other a lot," she says. Thus began a collaboration between "food consultant" McEachrene and "culinary artist" Idone.

Food has always been a hobby for McEachrene, a native. Trinidadian and graduate of the cordon bleu school in London. She has cooked and consulted internationally. Idone, who has produced three best-selling cookbooks, also lectures and teaches. The two of them were immediately attracted to the idea of co-producing a Caribbean cookbook. "We thought it would be a nice marriage of my knowledge and his expertise on the way you write a cookbook and how to get it published," McEachrene adds.

The result is Cooking Carib (Clarkson Potter, 1993), which begins with a brief description of what Idone calls the "genealogy of Caribbean cuisine." He traces the evolution of Caribbean ingredients from the Arawak Indians, who cultivated root crops and corn, to a market in Petionville, Haiti, in the 1970s, a cornucopia of vibrant sights, scents and sounds. In between are Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico and Trinidad, all of which are represented in 150 mouthwatering recipes.

"Whenever you think of Caribbean food, people tend to think English-speaking," McEachrene says. This book, however, "embraces not just the English-speaking Caribbean, but the French-speaking, the Dutch-speaking and the Spanish-speaking. You'll find recipes that are Chinese-influenced and East Indian-influenced. A lot of people don't know there's a huge East indian population in Trinidad. They have influenced our cuisine."

Although McEachrene was born in Trinidad, she went to boarding school in England, studied political science and international relations at the University of Geneva, then attended Madrid University, and has since traveled extensively throughout the Caribbean and Central America. She spent seven years in Mexico and has been in the States for the past 10. She's at home wherever she lives, and at each stop she has adapted her culinary roots to the available ingredients. "I think it was originally a talent, and now it's a skill because I've been doing it for so long," says the 50-year-old author.

If she can teach the Japanese to cook Caribbean, she can teach anyone. The Japanese serve food raw or cooked only briefly; the Caribbean method favors stewing, the longer, the better. McEachrene worked as a food consultant for two new Caribbean restaurants in Tokyo, Java Jive and Java Bay. In addition to finding substitutes for ingredients unavailable in Japan and teaching the chefs to cook Caribbean, McEachrene designed tabletops, coordinated waiters' uniforms and chose appropriate music for the restaurants.

"I think of Caribbean food as being more than a cuisine," she says. "It's a coming experience. It's not haute cuisine, but I think it will ... become more sophisticated and refined as the island populations blend." McEachrene's purpose in contributing her recipes to Cooking Carib was to emphasize the quilt-like quality and unique breadth of Caribbean cuisine, which she refers to as a regional cuisine. "Perhaps because I did so much work on the economic and cultural integration of the Caribbean, I find parallels in Caribbean cooking, where the unifying regional influence is African, as opposed to European."

"Slaves were brought to most of the Caribbean and Latin American countries, but because the Latin American [countries] are Spanish-speaking, they have been excluded. ... Puerto Ricans are as much West Indian as I am."

McEachrene seeks to use food as a political and cultural tool--as a means of combining American, Mexican and Caribbean cultures on people's palates, and subsequently in their minds. These ideals were brought to the fore in Mexico, when she worked for the Center for Economic and Social Studies of the Third World, from 1976 to 1983; there she initiated a project that treated the Caribbean as a geopolitical space defined by the integration of these cultures. An unfriendly administration and the decline of the Mexican economy put an end to her ideas, then considered radical, but only temporarily. Helen McEachrene has always expressed herself and explored cultures through food, and her work continues in Cooking Carib.

Violetta's Fried Chicken

Serves 4 to 6

These chicken morsels have a big bite! 8 pieces (about 3 lbs.) cut-up chicken Salt 1 medium onion, chopped 1 garlic clove, minced 1 tsp. dried thyme 1/4 tsp. ground cumin 1 Scotch bonnet or other hot chili pepper,