Trinidad and Tobago’s pelau is the type of dish that life doesn’t make anymore. Like the twin islands, pelau is complex and nuanced. It’s a twisty story of a meal that incorporates the culinary legacies and cooking techniques of the two most dominant ethnicities on the islands, Africans and East Indians. Pelau does more than just capture and reflect the cultural vibrancy of Trinbagonian life—it tells of the country’s tragic and triumphant history, encapsulating the richness of a truly multicultural society.
Pelau is not dissimilar from other protein-rich rice dishes found throughout the world. Like jambalaya, biryani, and paella, pelau is rice cooked with protein, aromatics, and vegetables. Typically, chicken or beef is used in pelau, and it’s seasoned with a bevy of pungent herbs and aromatics—scallions, cilantro, parsley, thyme, onions, ginger, garlic, and Scotch bonnets. This marinade provides an assertive and arresting bedrock of bright, unrelenting flavors in which the other ingredients—long-grain rice, pigeon peas, root vegetables, and coconut milk—are slowly simmered.
But it’s also a lot more than its parts. As one of Trinidad and Tobago’s unofficial national dishes (callaloo is another), pelau is a homegrown darling and its widespread appeal goes beyond its luscious and spiky bite. The power of pelau is in the way that its components give veiled visibility to almost all of the nation’s composite groups, from the Indigenous Amerindians (native herbs), to the European colonizers (oils), to the enslaved West Africans (pigeon peas), as well as the indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent (rice). With a distinct island lilt, pelau melds the rice preparations adored in the East with indigenous ingredients and African cookery processes that took root in the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. It manages to collapse the gulf between faiths and factions, being for Trinidadians of all stripes a dish that amplifies the islands’ history.
There is no precise certainty regarding when pelau first burst onto the scene, but it’s widely believed to have originated from polow, a popular rice dish in the Middle East and South and Central Asia that was adapted by East Indians into pilau (the Anglicized reworking being pilaf). In the mid-1800s, after slavery was abolished in the Caribbean, the first group of indentured laborers from the subcontinent was brought to Trinidad and Tobago on a ship called the Fatel Razack, and their arrival sparked the advent of a rich and robust Indian culture. Like many dishes from the East that were hybridized in the West Indies, pelau is a product of geographic syncretism: Rice, brought over from India, was cultivated in Trinidad’s fertile Caroni swamp, and the cooking technique of charring meats in scorched sugar is an African tradition. There exist few other dishes that hold the weight of the country’s history, and it is in this marvelous motley that pelau retains its cultural relevance. But it is in the deep and distinctive taste, where bright and bold savory flavors erupt, that pelau truly shows its steel. And it starts with sugar.
Burnt sugar essence (a.k.a. browning) is the ingredient that imparts pelau with its unmistakable darkness—and there can be no pelau without it. An essential ingredient in Caribbean cooking, browning harks back to an era when sugarcane, powered by slave labor, anchored the British economic interest in Trinidad and Tobago. The inclusion of browning in pelau and in many other native Caribbean dishes, like Black Cake, moves the brutal past of plantation slavery from the periphery of memory to the forefront. As Trinidad’s first prime minister Dr. Eric Williams wrote in his landmark book Capitalism and Slavery, “Strange that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed.”
