NY Times gives bake and shark top marks

People visit Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, for Carnival, or pass through on their way to more traditional vacations in Tobago, the nation’s other main island, a short flight away and thick with resorts.

But stay a while, exploring the busy streets in which V. S. Naipaul, the country’s prodigal son, found his literature and eventually a Nobel Prize, and a truth emerges: This is one of the great eating towns in the Caribbean, the greatest of the Lesser Antilles, and the fount of some of the finest rum in the world.

Start with breakfast, in particular the ones available at the Port Authority Canteen, a stevedore’s cafeteria perched on the edge of the harbour. It is made up of a dozen or so tiny kitchens with electric hot plates and propane hobs. There are long picnic tables in front of these, some set with oilskin cloths, others painted a soft lime green. They are packed for breakfast, and again for lunch and dinner — men eating in shifts, wolfishly, then heading back into the sun. Fans move the humidity around, under signs at each end of the room that proclaim, “No Obscene Language.”

People talk about the laid-back, easygoing nature of the Caribbean, but Trinidad is a working hub, one of the most prosperous islands in the region. There is plenty of off-work downtime, the slow and pleasant dance into sociable half-drunkenness that Trinidadians call “liming,” but the women who cook in the Port Authority Canteen have little time for it.

Charmaine Cupido is one of them. Her stall is in a far corner of the room, almost invisible from the door. Fish sandwiches are her thing, the delicacy known here as bake and shark, best consumed with one of the frothy sweet drinks sold nearby: a watery concoction of mauby bark, cinnamon and sugar, say, or sea moss and milk.

Ms Cupido slices a round of bread into two discs, and places on one of them a number of pieces of fried fish — carite that October morning, a local mackerel, though she’ll cook the traditional shark if she can find it at market.

The fish has a flavourful crust, bright with the tingle of ginger and pepper, with an undertow of salt: her special mix.

Next comes some lettuce, sliced tomato, sliced cucumber, along with a squirt of thinned ketchup and a more substantial one of her own pepper sauce, which has an orange, slightly sweet hot-pepper kick that is in tune with the morning hour.

She wraps this into a waxed-paper bag and sends you on your way, down to the far end of the cafeteria, where other women are doling out fresh juices in paper cups.

It is really about the best fish sandwich in the world. But, of course, there are others. Bake and shark is a point of national pride in Trinidad, and fierce debates rage over who serves the finest.

One of the handsomest places to take a stand on the matter is Maracas Bay, a 45-minute drive north from Port-of-Spain, and one of the island’s most famous beaches, both for its proximity to the capital and for its shocking beauty: a limp half-circle of soft, reddish sand beneath towering mountains and wisps of fog. Imagine the Oregon coast with palms the size of redwoods and water as warm as a baby’s bath and you have about a quarter of the experience; you need to add a funk of humidity, and much besides.

Courtesy New York Times