Two years into studying at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., I still felt adrift. Attending had been a leap — I’d left behind my home in Trinidad and a relationship — and, while some of the institute’s rules and conventions had managed to steady me, my biggest anchor remained the food of my island.
After an internship but before the final leg of my program, I returned home to see an old roommate get married. Touching down at the airport, I was welcomed as one of the country’s own. No longer a visitor, a stranger, an outsider or an immigrant, I was home.
At my brother Reynold’s place in the heart of Port-of-Spain, I slept for a full day. Rest was more restful in a country where I didn’t always have to wrestle. When I awoke, I made a beeline to Hot Shoppe, a small roti shop that serves the most silken dhal puri skins. My brother ordered his favorite: a curry chicken buss-up-shut, served with flaky paratha, stewed Chinese long beans (bodi), ethereally smooth pumpkin talkari spiked with geera (roasted cumin), aloo and channa amped with “slight peppa,” and a thump of mango achar. I had something I’ve enjoyed ever since I was a child: a boneless chicken mini roti with a banana Solo (a flavored soft drink).
I took the first bite, and pieces of the roti, filled with ground yellow split peas fell into my lap like saffron-scented fairy dust. For my brother, it was normal lunch on a Wednesday, but, for me, it held the magic of being in one’s country, even if that belonging was temporary, even if it presented as an illusion.
When we left Hot Shoppe, I told my brother how different Indo-Caribbean cooking is from the classical dishes we were tasked to replicate at school, expounding on how Trini-Indian food embodies lightness and sprightliness, something that couldn’t be replicated by exacting recipes in my classes.
Reynold could tell that the thing I needed most wasn’t to relive parts of what had caused me many sleepless nights. Disabused of the desire for any more school-related details, my brother simply said, “Yuh home now, sister. Like yuhself.”
Shortly after, I left for Tobago, Trinidad’s smaller, pristine little sister isle, an ecotourist’s dream, where locals and international visitors came to party, and where my mother now lived.
My childhood home in south Trinidad had outgrown my mother. A litany of issues — a leaky roof, nuisance neighbors — had accrued and soured her on our flat house, which she had once loved. Rather than contend with the barrage of problems, she wisely chose to sell it and move to Tobago.
Part of me wished that she’d kept our house. I would no longer have access to our grafted Julie mango tree, the moody crotons or the passion fruit vine that snaked along the chain-link fence on the sunny side of the house. As a little girl, my mother would place their seeds in the hollow of my hands, hopeful that as I grew I would always thirst for more.
I arrived at mum’s cute-as-can-be cottage, and there it was, a jug of passion fruit juice waiting for me, made the way I remembered, the way her mother made it — with a squeeze of lime juice and a dash of Angostura bitters. It was refreshing, redolent and somehow managed to taste of this new home, our old home and my grandmother’s home in Siparia, one that I never had the opportunity to experience, all at once. It embodied the people who had gone before and, when my mother made it for me, I was able to walk directly into the line of sight of a granny that I’d known only through stories and sepia-toned photographs.
That’s a recipe’s power: In a simple five-ingredient juice — passion fruit seeds, water, sugar, lime and bitters — death, in some small measure, itself dies. This was not just a quaint gesture on my mother’s part to welcome me.
Served in a faded pink plastic tumbler, this passion fruit juice offered lessons of geography and family traditions, politics and pleasure, slavery and survival in which no syllabus or game plan was necessary. There wasn’t a quiz that could calibrate how much passion fruit juice taught me. It was my past, present and future, and it was delicious.
The morning I had to leave Tobago, mum woke early and made mesada roti, a leavened flatbread, and her version of “baigan,” a quick-cooking eggplant stew zapped with garlic and curry powder. The simple dish defined island life; I’d eaten it most mornings growing up, and I’d almost forgotten about it.
With closed eyes, I took a big spoonful.
This was the food of my life, made from the hands that had given me just that. After emotional goodbyes, my mother and I hugged and allowed the silence to say the unspeakable: I was returning to “the world’s premier culinary college” knowing that the meal I’d just had could never be matched.
This article is an excerpt from “Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef” (St. Martin’s Press, 2026).
