Discover a taste of St Lucia on a food tour which includes three different culinary experiences – a Castries market tour, a Creole cookery class and making gourmet dishes with a professional chef.
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The food on the Caribbean island of St Lucia mixes up West Indian produce and Creole cooking techniques, with a touch of French flair, some British imports and a pinch of African and Indian spice. But what brings it together is that it’s packed with flavour.
Combine that with the fresh fruit and vegetables grown on the island’s rich volcanic soil, local herbs and spices, and mahi mahi and snapper straight out of the ocean, and you get dishes like saltfish and green fig, pepperpot stews and accra (spicy fishcakes).
But not many people outside the Caribbean know what St Lucian food has to offer. So on my trip to the island with Cap Maison hotel, I set out to taste the island from market to plate – including both traditional Creole cookery and gourmet Caribbean cuisine.
The market
St Lucian cuisine is all about the freshest ingredients, so our first stop was the market in Castries, where locals, tourists and chefs all come to pick up the tastiest island produce. The market has been running since the 1890s and has expanded to over 300 stalls selling fruit and veg, spices, rum and flowers, with a separate section for crafts, clothes and gifts.
Castries market takes place every morning except Sundays, but it’s busiest on Saturdays when farmers come from all over the island to sell their produce.
Walking into the market hits all your senses at once. There are the brightly coloured umbrellas shading tables piled with tropical fruit. The smell of nutmeg and cinnamon sticks warming in the heat. The sound of people bargaining and catching up on gossip.
Chef Edna took us around some of her favourite stalls to pick up ingredients. She didn’t have a shopping list, instead it was all about what looked, smelled and tasted the best – a world away from online shops and pre-packaged supermarket food at home.
We’d already seen trees weighed down with bananas and mangoes as we drove around the island. But here in the market there were hundreds of different fruits of all colours, shapes and sizes. Some like pineapples and soursop I knew, others like breadfruit and custard apples I’d heard of, but there were a whole lot more I knew nothing about.
Like the brilliantly named fat porks – a sour round red fruit around the size of a plum. We even came across a type of banana cane that Cap Maison head chef Craig had never heard of, despite spending over 20 years living and cooking on St Lucia.
We cooled off with a fresh coconut, with the top chopped off with a machete right on the stall and a straw to drink the water and dig the jelly out from inside. Despite the fact that we had been eating and drinking non-stop at the hotel, we still left the market piled high with fruit – a huge pineapple, tiny ripe mangoes, bags of soursops and fat porks.
On the way out we passed a line of food stalls where you can try freshly prepared local dishes made with market produce, but we had our own cookery to do.
The local cookery class
Trying out the local food and drink when you travel is such a big part of experiencing a new destination and culture. But sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re getting the real deal, or whether hotels and restaurants are adapting things to make them tourist-friendly.
So one of the best ways to find out how people really eat at home is by going and eating with them. Cookery classes with local residents have exploded in popularity recently, and they’re a great way to get to know the people and the food in a place you’re visiting.
We spent the morning learning about Creole food in St Lucia with Auntie Madeleine at her house in the village of Gros Islet, a few minutes from Cap Maison. This is a real family home, with the kids dropping in to watch or show us their Lego. It made it super relaxed and easy-going – we just pulled up a chair at the kitchen counter and joined in.
On the menu were two different traditional dishes. First was bouyon – a thick stew with mutton, red beans, vegetables and ‘ground provisions’ (starchy vegetables like yams, plantains and green figs). And second was fresh crab in a coconut curry sauce.
The traditional way to cook in St Lucia is in a clay pot full of charcoal, and Madeleine had a couple of these ‘coal pots’ set up outside. It’s a simple but effective way to cook one-pan dishes, with the mutton and beans for the bouyon already bubbling away.
Next to go in were the ground provisions – which in this case were green bananas and green figs – followed by diced pumpkin and carrot. Some of the vegetables had also already been cooked and blended in to thicken the bouyon up. And finally Madeleine rolled some dumplings to add into the pot a few minutes before it was ready to serve.
In the next pot, oil and turmeric were heated up before adding the crab claws (or ‘crab hands’ as Madeleine’s son christened them – he’s not a seafood fan!). Next came chopped onion, garlic, herbs, chili and coconut milk, blended up straight out of the coconut.
We all ate together outside, scooping up spoonfuls of bouyon and pulling open crab claws to suck the meat out – one of the messiest, tastiest and most fun meals I’ve had. Simple, fresh ingredients but tons of flavour. All toasted with a boozy concoction of 80% proof rum, lime juice and honey – the St Lucian cure for a cold (or pretty much anything).
The chef’s table
After seeing local produce in the market and trying traditional Creole cooking, the last part of our St Lucia food tour took a bit of both and added something extra. The Caribbean isn’t really known for haute cuisine, but Cap Maison chef Craig Jones is trying to change that.
Craig trained in France and worked in Michelin-starred kitchens in the UK before moving to the Caribbean. Now he’s creating high-end dishes which mix St Lucian ingredients with contemporary techniques and some seriously beautiful presentation skills.
Craig and fellow chef Edna showed us how it’s done in the kitchens of Saman House, which was the original owners’ residence at Cap Maison. On the menu were freshly caught red snapper, seafood tortellini, fried plantain, fennel salad and Creole dressing.
It’s the type of food you find on the menu at the hotel’s restaurant. And although it sounds simple, so much work and attention to detail goes into every single part of each dish. Even the presentation is meticulously planned on paper before cooking starts.
First you make the pasta for the tortellini – Edna trained in Italy so has it down to a fine art, rolling out perfectly thin sheets in the pasta maker, ready to be stuffed with seafood and pinched into a belly button shape before being dropped into boiling water.
Next came the Creole dressing, made with finely chopped peppers, onion, chili and culantro (a local herb that tastes like coriander) and dressed with vinegar and coconut oil. Then the plantain was fried, the snapper filleted and grilled, and the tortellini cooked.
Finally Craig was ready to plate up the dish, starting with the plantain, followed by the snapper and finely grated fennel. Tiny dots of avocado mousse were piped around the plate, the dressing spooned over the tortellini, and micro greens arranged on top.
The end result was almost too pretty to eat – but we managed, and it was every bit as tasty as it was beautiful. Cookery at this level is a real art form and it’s fascinating to see how you can take the traditional and add something new that elevates it to another level. Yet another ingredient to add into the delicious mixture that is St Lucian cuisine.
The details
Our St Lucia food tours were organised by Cap Maison Hotel & Spa. A private tour of Castries market to buy ingredients followed by a cookery class with Craig Jones or one of the other Cap Maison chefs costs from $210 (£172/€205) for two people.
If you’re not staying at Cap Maison, you can also book a similar private tour* of Castries market, which includes trying some local specialities. Or take a three-hour Creole cookery class* and learn to make then enjoy a local main course, dessert and rum punch.
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