When my dad was 11, he and his family moved from Guyana to the United States (thanks to the generous sponsorship of a couple who ended up being my maternal great grandparents), and his family brought with him all sorts of recipes to make what they call (or maybe it's just my dad's name for it--it's hard to tell sometimes) "bush food."
For years I thought Pepperpot was just a made up name for a dish his mom makes. After all, it's cooked in a large pot and there are a lot of peppers in it. Makes sense, I thought. And it's not like they don't have strange names for other things (bora, for example, is what they call green beans). I knew that Pepperpot is supposed to be a special dish that my dad (and his mother before him) only ever makes Christmas morning. A couple years ago, however, I learned that Pepperpot was not only the real name of this dish, but that it is also the national dish of Guyana. So I thought I would share with you this integral part of my childhood--basically, Christmas in a bowl.
There are a few different versions of this recipe floating around the interwebs, but here is how my family makes it. You need:
A pressure cooker or pot with a locking lid
5-6 lbs of boneless roast and country style ribs
(2:1 ratio of roast to ribs)
Four 2" whole cinnamon sticks
3 Habanero peppers finely chopped
15 oz. Casareep
Some people add orange peel, cloves, sugar (brown and granulated) and different peppers to make it hot, and although I think it might be fun to experiment with other ways of making this dish, I grew up with the Pepperpot my family makes so I'm partial to my own recipe!
A couple notes on the ingredients: Casareep (pronounced more like caz-rip) is probably something you will need to order online or pick up in a special store--we've never been able to find it in a grocery store. Casareep is a dark brown, almost black, sauce made from extracting and boiling the juices of a specific kind of cassava root in sugar so that it ends up looking almost like molasses. Casareep also has a preserving agent in it; in fact, this dish was originally created so that one could cook a big pot of wild game and preserve it without needing to refrigerate it. My dad usually makes this dish in a pressure cooker only because it has a locking lid which he shuts before storing the dish on the stove. Back to the recipe:
Cut the fat off your meat--you want it to be very lean. You could also steam the meat for about 20 minutes, and that will help get the fat off. Whatever fat is left will eventually float to the top of the pot and can be skimmed off later. Afterwards, put all of your ingredients into your pot and fill will water so that the meat can be submerged (although it will want to float to the top). Your pot will look something like this:
It doesn't look very appetizing right now, but bear with me! My dad usually puts in about 5 ounces of Casareep in first and then periodically pours more Casareep in until the 15 oz. bottle is empty, but there is no reason you cannot put it all in to begin with. Bring the water to a low boil and cook your meat for about 3-4 hours or until the meat falls off the bone.
When you are done, it will look something like this (that meat just falls apart, by the way!):
When you are done eating, you can simply lock up your pot and store your leftovers on the stove. The next morning, just heat it up and eat it again! You can do this until it's gone, pretty much. As you continue to heat it over time, the sauce will get thicker and darker because more and more of the water will escape as steam as you heat it each time. Some recipes will create a very dark, thick sauce to begin with, but I don't like adding the extra sugar you would need to add to make it do that. Traditionally this dish is eaten with Guyanese plait bread, but we typically just eat it with a loaf of white bread that we bake.
It's hard to describe the taste of this dish: it's sweet, it tastes like cinnamon, but it is also HOT. I go through a lot of bread and milk when I eat this just to calm down the burn in my mouth--it's a good burn, though.
So there you have it! Enjoy!
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