How chefs, culinary historians, and cookbook writers are keeping their centuries-old diasporic culture alive.
PinMany dishes comprise the world of Garifuna cuisine, but hudutu, a velvety ball of mashed plantain that’s served with soups and stews, is probably its signature. Called hudutu baruru when made with both green and ripe plantains, it has a soft, dense texture, and sometimes a subtle sweetness. It might be served with takini—a stew of cabbage, warm spices, and king fish—or falmo, a seafood broth enriched with coconut milk and flavored with black pepper, garlic, and onions.
"My husband would always say, ‘One of these days, I'm going to open a restaurant for her,’" Castillo says, with a laugh. A few years later, Rhodel Castillo made good on his promise. "Garifuna food, in particular, tells us a Caribbean story and a Central American story," says Pablo Joseph López Oro, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African and African Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. "It gives us an opportunity to really think about the generational history of Garifuna migration."
At 15, Gutierrez-Sumner migrated to Houston, and later moved to New York for a career in dance and acting. When she ventured out to neighborhood restaurants to try new cuisines, her interest in her personal history piqued when she noticed similarities between Garifuna cuisine and dishes from other coastal communities.
"Nothing ever goes to waste," notes Gutierrez-Sumner, of the community’s ingenuity and agricultural knowledge. She recalls how her great-great-grandmother taught generations of her family how to be efficient with ingredients."She was savvy. She knew that if she grated the coconut and she squeezed the first milk out of the coconut without adding water, that was going to be her butter," shares Gutierrez-Sumner.
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