The distinct bittersweet fragrance accented with smoky notes, select spices, crisp bay leaves and blazing hot peppers will waft through the homes of Guyanese, as we prepare to celebrate Christmas with our most famous national dish. Each dip into that dark, delicious sauce that deepens with flavour daily, is due to a living cuisine, indigenous and ancient in origin.
Early historical references speak of “casaripe” being “a preservative made from the juice of the cassava, boiled and flavoured with red pepper.” A note from 1825, cited by the Guyanese-born linguist Richard Allsopp in his ‘Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage,” notes, “(casareep) reduces all flesh to one flavour its own…and has antiseptic qualities which keep meat boiled in it good for a long time. The result is …the far-famed pepperpot which, first made by the Indians (indigenous peoples), all settlers in the West Indies have now learned to make and like.”
By the 1870s, pharmaceutical publications were spelling it “cassareep,” an Anglicized version of the indigenous name, stressing that “as the material for an excellent dish and as a good antiseptic, it should be more generally known in Britain.” An 1872 Food Journal praised it as “a valuable and well-known material in the West Indies and British Guiana for flavouring soups, as well as in the preparation of a noted dish called pepper-pot, which is prepared in the following manner: The juice after being expressed from the roots is strained and boiled in an earthen vessel, the scum being carefully removed during boiling; by the time it is reduced to about half its original bulk and about the consistence of a syrup, it is seasoned according to fancy with salt and black and red pepper, and if the preparation is intended to be kept for any length of time, cinnamon, mace, and cloves are added; the higher the seasoning and the longer it is boiled, the more suited is it for keeping.”
The bitter cassava extract is poisonous since it contains acetone cyanohydrin, a compound which decomposes to the highly toxic hydrogen cyanide on contact with water. Hydrogen cyanide called “prussic acid” is volatile and dissipates when heated.
Cassareep “is said to be a most delicious preparation, and applicable to a great variety of purposes in domestic economy,” the journal raved. “A tablespoonful mixed with a tureen of pea-soup imparts to it the richness and flavour of strong beef-soup. Meat boiled in cassareep can be kept for a much longer period than if preserved by any other process.” It mentioned “that some Dutch planters in British Guiana have, by means of the addition of a small quantity of cassareep from time to time to varieties of animal food,” been able “to keep in daily use the same pepper-pot for several years. Cassareep can be obtained at some of the best Italian warehouses in London at about five shillings per quart bottle.”
“Cassarip” is how the famous 19th century German botanist Richard Schomburgk relayed an early recorded description of the condensed black liquid left from the slow, careful boiling of extracted bitter cassava juice by the women of the Warrau tribe in the village of “Cumaka,” (Kumaka), now in Region One, Barima-Waini.
“The ‘pepper-pot’ of the Dutch colonists celebrated for the past hundred years depends for its chief ingredient upon this sauce, into which the meat left over is thrown after each meal: fresh Cassarip…is now and again poured over it. The greater the age of such a pot, the greater the store set on it: the one belonging to a Dutch family must have been therefore a real gem, which the housewife had known how to keep unspoiled and of course (the pot) also uncleaned for thirty years.”
According to the late Guyanese Anglican priest John Peter Bennett, who was recognised with the Golden Arrow of Achievement, our fourth highest award, for his work including a landmark compilation of a Lokono/English dictionary, cassareep is derived from the Arawak/Lokono word “kashiripo” for the thick molasses-like juice that acquires the characteristic rich caramelized hue and intense taste.
The Lokono “people thought it assumed the colour of a potato called ‘kashiri’ so it was referred to as ‘kashiripo’ but they “have virtually forgotten the original name ‘selei,’” he disclosed in one of the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures sponsored by the Department of Culture, back in 1986.
Cassava juice or “keheli” is heated in a large pot until “the cream rises to the top as with cow’s milk. This is skimmed off, boiled further and is made into a (separate) sauce which imparts a delicious flavour to whatever meat or fish it is added. This sauce, which looks like mayonnaise, is called ‘kelikotha” Canon Bennett explained. Born in 1914 in Kabakaburi, in the Pomeroon region regarded as the best producer of Guyanese cassareep, the linguist died in 2011.
Made for thousands of years across the Amazon region, the sauce is called by many tribal titles including tucupi negro and tucupi preto, kumaji, ualako and casaramá. With all the flavours of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, cassareep is increasing in the mainstream kitchens of adventurous chefs.
But in the late 19th century, the British Chemistry Professor John Attfield was most unimpressed. A specimen of the “boiled juice of the bitter cassava,” having “a dark brown colour and a consistency of thick cream” sent to him from Jamaica for analysis and study found mostly “vegetable matter,” with water, a bit of iron and no trace of cane or grape sugar.
Conducting several experiments on cooked and raw beef and mutton flavoured with the cassava extract and stored in cupboards, the Professor reported the meat became “tainted,” “putrid” and “mouldy.” He concluded “the cassava juice contains nothing that imparts to it antiseptic powers of great value” and “its property of retarding the decomposition of raw or cooked animal matter is not greater than that possessed by such common aromatics as pepper;” deeming it “wholly inadequate” for preserving meat on any “important scale.”
He argued that “the slight antiseptic character” was due to “a very small quantity of aromatic oil.” A colleague observed cassareep contained “a notable quantity of prussic acid,” that was “very remarkable” for retarding fermentation. Another maintained the preservative properties “must be very considerable, as he believed it was the custom of families in Jamaica, and other places in the West Indies, to keep a large pot of the prepared juice in the house, into which were thrown odd pieces of cooked meat, bones, etc., where they were preserved for almost any length of time. So long as they were kept under the surface no decomposition occurred.”
In Caroline Sullivan’s “A Collection of 19th Century Jamaican Cookery and Herbal Recipes” published in Kingston in 1893, she advised, “Get an earthen vessel. To every quart of cold water, add three tablespoonfuls of the pure cassaripe with salt to taste and a handful of bird peppers. If these cannot be had, use some cayenne. Cut the meat into small pieces after being well cooked, and put into the pot: boil well for half an hour. Any sort of meat may be used, all mixed in it, and hard boiled eggs are an improvement. It should be warmed every day, and something added each day.”
I may consider the eggs, but I will certainly pass on Mr Attfield’s mutton-chop that he “kept sweet for a month by immersing it in a decoction of cocoa containing a little pepper.”
ID stirs her Guyanese stew, wishes all a hearty Christmas and laughs about the myth of the century-old Grenadian pepperpot given that the cook died long before. Pepperpot is also a soup in several Caribbean countries, and the United States of America where it is a dialect synonym for hodgepodge or topsy-turvy.
