Car­ol Quash

It's not hard to find guides to the best Caribbean restau­rants. But there's one as­pect of the tra­di­tion­al culi­nary ex­pe­ri­ence that's been over­looked: street food. That is un­til now, be­cause writer and food ed­i­tor Anu Lakhan has tak­en up the chal­lenge to turn this valu­able, un­doc­u­ment­ed in­for­ma­tion in­to a se­ries en­ti­tled Caribbean Street Food; A Guide to the Best Places to Eat on the Street.

On the menu

Be­gin­ning with T&T, the se­ries fea­tures the best street foods to be had through­out the length and breadth of the is­lands–in­clud­ing warn­ings of the pos­si­bil­i­ties of spills, drips and long lines. The au­thor lists the ed­i­bles in al­pha­bet­i­cal or­der and quotes the es­ti­mat­ed cost of each item in TT dol­lars, British pounds and US dol­lars. She al­so goes to the trou­ble of en­sur­ing that read­ers do not mis­take a "lime" for a sour fruit, point­ing out it's how we re­fer to a so­cial gath­er­ing in this part of the world.

It would have been near im­pos­si­ble for Lakhan to list all of the vari­a­tions of street foods avail­able but the more pop­u­lar items are all in­clud­ed. These range from bake to souse; pep­per sauce to punch­es; roti to nuts, just to name a few. Lakhan even in­cludes the pop­u­lar jerk.

Don't try this at home

The book is fit­ting­ly il­lus­trat­ed with pho­tos, by Alex Smailes, of ven­dors and ob­vi­ous­ly sat­is­fied cus­tomers en­joy­ing their street food pur­chas­es. It gives a pic­to­r­i­al and ver­bal de­scrip­tion of each item and, where pos­si­ble, its ori­gin. Lakhan has de­lib­er­ate­ly shied away from giv­ing recipes, be­cause, as she put it, "By con­sen­sus and com­mon sense, street food is not to be–in­deed, should not be at­tempt­ed at home," adding that "street food com­pris­es of all ed­i­ble mat­ter (be­ing bought) from stalls, tents or oth­er tem­po­rary struc­tures; carts, trol­leys, vans, sta­tion wag­ons or oth­er wheeled things; and bas­kets, buck­ets, bags, trays or oth­er ar­ti­cles of con­veyance used by an in­di­vid­ual.

Holes-in-the-wall, though per­ma­nent, are al­so in­clud­ed, since they of­fer lit­tle or no con­ve­nience." Caribbean Street Food; A Guide to the Best Places to Eat on the Street is a mouth-wa­ter­ing must-have for limers, peo­ple on the go, and tourists.