Everything you need to read, watch and listen to this month
Read
For the flavour player
Caribbean Cookbook: The Best Tropical Sun Recipes You Need to Put in Your Kitchen by Rola Oliver
A little underrepresented, beyond those balmy islands and their international diaspora, Caribbean cuisine yields all sorts of fruity and spicy surprises. This cookbook makes a good first of the various tricky strands that comprise each dish – not merely the ingredients, but also the currents of migration and colonisation that gave rise to gastronomic traditions on Jamaica and other ports of call, as Rola Oliver guides you through recipes for jerks, curries and punches.
For the pescatarian
Kusima Mada by Jason Allport and Dr. Sangeeta Mangubhai
Another tropical cookbook, and the first of its kind ever produced in Fiji, with support from the Wildlife Conservation Society. Aussie chef Jason Allport was drafted in to design 80-plus recipes around a vast and varied selection of locally and sustainably sourced Fijian seafood. The dishes are duly arranged by habitat within the book, drawn as they are from fish and other ingredients particular to certain rivers, mangrove swamps, coral reefs and stretches of open Pacific Ocean.
For the romantic foodie
Simmer Down by Sarah Smith
An ideal summer beach read on a tropical holiday, or even just a vicarious escape through fiction if you can’t get so far away, this vivid, fragrant novel combines the twin pleasures of Hawaiian landscapes and related food-based reveries. Smith’s breezy plotting outlines a multicultural romance between two young rival chefs as they compete in the Maui Food Truck Festival, complete with detailed descriptions of their recipes and lush evocations of the island setting.
Watch
THE GLOBE
The most doggedly “international” of TV cookery contests, The Globe creates detailed virtual simulations of exotic backdrops such as Oaxaca, Maui and Nakhon Si Thammarat – in which chefs apply their skills to local dishes, drawing on equipment and ingredients that are often wildly unfamiliar to their repertoires (grasshoppers, for example). As a British Royal Navy veteran who travels the world, presenter Robert Irvine seems the right guy to handle the location-hopping, while chief judge Daniela Soto-Innes brings on experts from each stop to advise on the final decisions.
Listen
Viva Tropical
John Linnes and Park Wilson have broadened their definition of the “American dream” to include the tropics far to the south of the United States, pursuing better lives as real estate developers in Panama, Costa Rica and beyond. Their podcast is nominally geared toward aspiring expats with similar goals in Latin America, but it also covers a broad and fascinating range of socio-cultural topics that tend to ignite the imagination of the more general listener, from Colombian street food to the culinary traditions of Amazonian tribes.
vivatropical.com
