Mesoamerica · Volume 07, Belize, Honduras and the Mosquito Shore

Stew chicken

Belize (Kriol)

Illustration

by Belize (Kriol)

The single most useful source found for this chapter is not a cookbook or a heritage body but a peer-reviewed anthropology paper: Richard Wilk's "'Real Belizean Food': Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean" (American Anthropologist, 1999), the product of fieldwork in Belize going back to 1973. Wilk's argument, stated in his own words, is the reason this chapter refuses to write "the cuisine of Belize and Honduras" as one smooth thing: "Belizean restaurants appeared first in New York, then Los Angeles; Belizean cuisine is a concept invented almost entirely outside of Belize. Under a national label it submerges ethnic distinctions between what Belizeans call 'Spanish' food (tamales, garnachas, chirmole), Garifuna dishes like cassava bread and fish stew (sere), and Creole foods like boil-up and rice-and-beans." He quotes, verbatim, what was likely the first restaurant to brand itself explicitly "Belizean," a radio advertisement placed by a Belize-born couple returning after twenty years in the United States: "Treat yourself to a Belizean Feast. Authentic Belizean dishes, Garnachas, Tamales, Rice and Beans, Stew Chicken, Fried Chicken." Every dish on that list was already being cooked, separately, by its own ethnic tradition, all over Belize. What was new was the label, and the label was invented in a diaspora restaurant, not at home. Wilk's own 1990 door-to-door survey of 389 Belizeans found only eight dishes, out of twenty one rated, that respondents clearly agreed were "Belizean Creole food." Even Belizeans do not agree on a single bounded national cuisine. This chapter follows Wilk's own distinction rather than inventing a tidier one: Garifuna dishes are Garifuna, Kriol dishes are Kriol, and where the two genuinely meet, as with cassava's crossing between them, this chapter says so rather than blurring it.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Stew chicken

Exact quantities and timings came only from Western or diaspora recipe sources rather than an in-tradition Belizean-published one

Ingredients

The method as the tradition gives it, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them, lead dishes first.

4 lb (1.8kg), cut into pieces chicken
brown sugar
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
vinegar or lime juice
3 tablespoons (45g), or 2 to 3 store bought recado balls red recado
to taste salt and pepper
thyme
cumin
cilantro
garlic
ginger
1 large, diced (about 200g) onion
sweet pepper
tomato
as available water, a little, to finish the stewing liquid

Method

Season the chicken first with vinegar or lime juice, red recado, salt, pepper, thyme, cumin and cilantro.
Melt brown sugar in hot oil until it turns a dark, near-burnt caramel, timed deliberately just short of scorching.
Sear the chicken directly in that caramelised sugar-oil.
Add garlic and ginger to the caramel just before the chicken.
Once the meat is well coloured, add onion, sweet pepper, tomato and a little water to finish the stewing liquid.

Notes

As with rice and beans, exact quantities and timings for this dish came, in the research behind this chapter, only from Western or diaspora recipe sources rather than an in-tradition Belizean-published one; the mechanism is stated as fact, the precise numbers are not.

The same mechanism, under different names, runs through Trinidadian brown stew, Guyanese pepperpot and Jamaican brown stew chicken.

What a modern chef changes

A controlled caramel, a confit bird

Rung 04

Method

Build the caramel in a heavy pan over direct, closely watched heat rather than trying to manage it inside a larger vessel, then transfer the caramel base to the main pot once it is exactly where it needs to be, since the caramel's timing, seconds between perfect and burnt, is the single hardest part of this technique to control in a home kitchen.
Confit the chicken thighs sous vide first, at a temperature that holds them genuinely moist, then finish them, briefly and hard, in the caramelised sugar-oil for colour and crust only, rather than asking the caramel stage to also fully cook the meat, a real risk of the caramel burning before the chicken is done in the traditional single-pan method.
Toast and grind the cumin fresh in a dedicated spice grinder rather than using pre-ground, a small but real difference against the bittersweet caramel base.

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