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Despite a seeming overabundance of international cookbooks, a number of nations simply fall off the culinary world map of the publishing world. Guyana is one such place. Traditional Guyanese cooking is an exciting blend of East Indian, Portuguese, European, African, Chinese and Amerindian culinary heritage. Despite being the original "fusion cuisine," it is rarely documented in print.

I was lucky to be introduced to the exciting flavors of Guyanese cuisine by an accomplished and patient chef. My colleague Basmittie Sewcharran has been bringing her lunch to the New York Public Library for over 30 years. She enjoys growing her own vegetables and is fond of incorporating American ingredients into traditional Guyanese cooking. A frequent beneficiary of her culinary skills, I am delighted to record and share some of her favorite dishes with our readers.

Guyana's signature national dish is pepperpot. A Christmas staple, this rich and spicy stew requires one very special sauce. Made from a root of a local cassava plant, authentic cassareep is a key ingredient of this festive dish. Visually similar to yucca, cassava belongs to a different plant family. Both plants have one dangerous common quality: if not processed correctly they can be quite toxic. The following video does an excellent job of explaining a collaborative process of converting fleshy cassava root into viscous and fragrant cassareep. While some purists insist that this dish must be cooked with beef, on a recent segment of his Uncharted  show Chef Gordon Ramsay cooked his pepperpot with chicken.

Basmattie prefers lamb. To feed four to six  people, you would require 3 lbs of lamb cubes,1 cup of cassareep, 4 cinnamon sticks, 5 cloves of sugar, 1/2 tsp of allspice, 5 sprigs of thyme, 2 sprigs of basil, 2 oz of brown sugar, wiri wiri peppers, and salt to taste. Marinate your lamb with lime and set it aside for 10 minutes. Season it with salt and pepper, before browning it in a large pot. Transfer lamb to a dish and drain some of the fat. Cook onions and garlic until tender. Return meat to the pot, along with cassareep and all the remaining ingredients. Add a sufficient amount of water to cover the meat and place a lid on the pot. Keep the dish boiling on a gentle simmer for approximately three hours. Serve with crusty white bread.

Wiri wiri peppers are native to Guyana, but can be substituted with scotch bonnet, or a similar fiery relative. Frequently described as " little cherry bombs," these peppers measure between 100 and 300 SHU on a Scoville Heat Unit Measurement Scale. While Basmattie grows her supply of wiri wiri peppers in her garden, I was able to pick up a pint of wiri wiri peppers on a recent trip to Union Square Market. Two whole wiri wiri peppers inflamed my cabbage soup to a barely tolerable level.

In addition to festive pepperpot, Basmattie is very fond of cooking curries. Curries came to Guyana with a large wave of indentured laborers from India. Unlike traditional curries from India ,Guyanese curries omit paprika and tomatoes, but include potatoes and green onions. Garam Masala spice mix is the key ingredient in all of Basmattie's curries. To prepare Basmattie's Chicken Curry, you would need the following ingredients: a whole chicken cut to pieces, 1-1/2 tbsp of curry powder, tbsp of Garam masala, 1/2 tablespoon of roasted cumin, 1/2 tbsp of garlic powder, chopped onion, 2 sprigs of thyme, chopped scallions to taste, and a hot pepper of your choice. Add curry and the rest of the ingredients (except for chicken) into a pan with heated oil. Cook for five minutes, stirring to prevent burning. Adding a small amount of water to the pan will create a paste and avoid burning all the ingredient. Simmer the dish for 20 minutes. Serve with rice and garnish it with chopped scallions.

Many of the slaves brought to Guyana in the 17th century came from Western Africa. The provenance of another popular Guyanese dish can be traced to Ghana. In Twi language metemgee means "plantains make it good." Indeed they do! Metemgee, a nourishing  stew of various root vegetables, is cooked in coconut milk. Assorted pieces of salted meat are added to the pot as well. Basmattie cooks a vegetarian version of this highly gratifying comfort dish. To cook a vegetarian metemgee you would need 1 can of coconut milk, 2 potatoes, 2 cassava roots, 2 ripe plantains, 1 yellow onion, 5 gloves of garlic, 1 habanero pepper, 2 teaspoons of thyme, half a package of noodles and salt to taste. In a medium saucepan bring a cup of water and a cup of coconut milk to a gentle simmer. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring everything to a simmer. Cook for about 30 minutes before adding dumplings to the pot. In five minutes take the dish off the flame. Steam dumplings (referred to as duff), require 2 cups of flour, 1/4 cups of sugar, 1 tbsp of salt, 1 tbsp of baking powder, 1 tbsp of butter at room temperature, and a cup of  milk, or water. Combine dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Form a well in the center of the dry ingredients. Add milk or water and knead mixture into a soft dough. Cover the bowl and let it rest for 30 minutes. In a large pot bring 6 cups of water to boil. Form dough into golf size balls and drop them into the boiling water. Reduce the heat to medium and steam dumplings for approximately 10 minutes. 

As in many other cultures, traditional Guyanese recipes are often learned though communal and family meal preparation. Without direct observation or participation, ingredients are frequently described as "according to taste, " or as "a bit of that" and "a splash of this." I am very grateful to Basmattie for quantifying her recipes for my benefit! If you are interested in learning about Guyana's rich cultural heritage, please refer to the list of titles below.

Books About the History and Culture of Guyana

The Guyana Story: From Earliest Times to Independence by Ismael Odeen

Written by an experienced diplomat, this volumes traces the country's history from thousands of years ago when the first Amerindian groups began to settle on the Guyana territory. It examines the period of early European exploration leading to Dutch colonization, the forcible introduction of African slaves to work on cotton and sugar plantations, the effects of European wars, and the final ceding of the territory to the British who ruled it as their colony until they finally granted it independence in 1966. The book also tells of Indian, Chinese, and Portuguese indentured immigration and shows how the cultural interrelationships among the various ethnic groups introduced newer forms of conflict, but also brought about cooperation in the struggles of the workers for better working and living conditions.

Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast by Marjoleine Kars 

The story of a massive eighteenth century slave rebellion in the Dutch colony that was to become Guyana, is written in the best traditions of narrative nonfiction. Historian Marjoleine Kars offers a riveting and well-researched tale, including rare first-person eyewithess accounts of African-born slaves. 

Caribbean Visionary: A.R. F. Webber and the making of the Guyanese Nation by Selwyn R. Cudjoe 

This book traces the life of Albert Raymond Forbes Webber ( 1881-1932), a distinguished Caribbean scholar, statesman, legislator and novelist. Using Webber as a lens, it outlines the Guyanese struggle for justice and equality in an age of colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship. The author examines Webber's emergence from the interior of Guyana to become a major presence in Caribbean politics. 

Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur 

In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a "coolie"―the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother's story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives.

Musical Life in Guyana: History and Politics of Controlling Creativity by Vibert C. Cambridge

Musical Life in Guyana is the first in-depth study of Guyanese musical life. It is also a richly detailed description of the social, economic, and political conditions that have encouraged and sometimes discouraged musical and cultural creativity in Guyana. The book contributes to the study of the interactions between the policies and practices by national governments and musical communities in the Caribbean.

New Homelands: Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji and East Africa by Paul Younger 

This book is the story of how in six different locations indentured workers from India were able to design Hindu communities for themselves, and how those communities continue to thrive in those post-colonial societies. 

Guyana in Fiction 

In the Key of Nira Ghani by Natasha Deek

A contemporary, coming-of-age story, about a Guyanese girl who must find the balance between her parents' "Old World" expectations and traditions while pursuing her dream of being a great trumpeter. 

The Sly Company of People  Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya 

In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world.

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