Guide to gastronomic Grenada: Caribbean island a paradise for foodies

The easy wood desk in entrance of me is groaning with produce. Some, I’m accustomed to – mango, papaya, candy potato, jackfruit – and a few I’m not – breadnut (just like a chestnut), soursop (a custard apple) and mamey (a fleshy crimson fruit).

There are fragrant sticks of cinnamon, knobbly hunks of ginger, peanut-like shells containing tamarind, plump, shiny gourds and five-sided starfruit.

There’s additionally a small, spherical yellow fruit containing a brilliant crimson stone: that is nutmeg, which helped give Grenada, the Caribbean island I’m visiting, its nickname, the Spice Isle.

Grenada, regardless of being solely 21 miles lengthy and 12 miles huge, produces greater than 20 per cent of the world’s nutmeg.

Nutmeg is so invaluable an export that it’s referred to as ‘black gold’ and even options on the nationwide flag.

I’m on the Belmont Property, a sprawling 300 acres of fertile farmland that sits within the parish of St Andrew on the north-east of the island, discovering a few of Grenada’s bounty at first hand.

After speaking me via the listing of unique foodstuffs grown right here, Jason, an property supervisor, proffers a brownish-yellow oval pod and asks me to peel the pores and skin.

Alongside coconut bake, a standard bread made with flour and coconut, I attempt callaloo – a leafy, spinach-like vegetable – steamed with garlic and onion; inexperienced banana and saltfish croquettes; cou-cou – a cornmeal dish just like polenta – and a fish curry with ‘provisions’ (greens together with yams, cassava and potatoes).

Every thing has come from inside just a few miles, if not just a few metres, and tastes scrumptious. It’s an instance of how Grenadians eat on daily basis and a motive why the island received final 12 months’s inaugural title of world Culinary Capital.

Native persons are thrilled concerning the recognition. Belmont’s proprietor, Shadel Nyack-Compton, says: ‘We have been blown away after we heard we’d received. We’re so excited {that a} small island like ours, with no refined gastronomy, might be recognised.’

Later, I head to Grenada’s small, charming capital, St George’s, within the south-west – the route passing via the island’s lush however twisty and mountainous volcanic inside. Pastel-coloured homes cling to steep hillsides, plentiful flower bushes line the roadside, and timber groan with ripe fruit and greens, able to drop, to be foraged by the forest-dwelling mona monkeys.

The place names are a legacy of Grenada’s time spent as a British colony – it gained independence in 1974. In addition to the street indicators, I cross the Nationwide Cricket Stadium – persons are cricket-crazy right here.

In St George’s, the place tethered boats bob in turquoise water, I meet Belinda Bishop, a chef who’s exhibiting me spherical the principle market.

Some gadgets listed below are utilized in dishes similar to those I’ve already tried. Others have extra, let’s say, distinctive makes use of, similar to bois bande, a tree bark that, when brewed with rum, is claimed to have Viagra-like properties.

I’m extra enthusiastic about a sponge-like mass known as sea moss, touted as the subsequent superfood. ‘It’s one of many causes all of us look so younger right here!’ says Belinda, ‘because it’s full of nutritional vitamins, minerals and vitamins.’ You should purchase it ready-made as a gel, which you add to meals or water, so I purchase a number of jars, hoping to lose ten years off my face.