The Food of West Indian Day Carnival on Eastern Parkway

What gets cooked along the parkway

On Labor Day the food along Eastern Parkway is Trinidadian, Jamaican, Guyanese, Barbadian, Haitian and Grenadian at once, cooked mostly on the sidewalk. Doubles, two soft bara breads folded around curried channa. Corn soup out of a stockpot, thick with split peas and dumplings and whole cobs. Jerk chicken and pork blackening over charcoal in cut oil drums. Roti wrapped around curried chicken, channa or potato. Pelau, rice browned in burnt sugar and cooked down with meat and pigeon peas. Fried fish and escovitch. Festival and bake. Macaroni pie. Rice and peas. Patties by the bagful.

To drink there is sorrel, mauby, ginger beer, peanut punch, coconut water and cane juice, sold from coolers by people who have been doing it in the same spot for years.

That's the shortest honest answer to what Carnival food is. The longer answer is where any of it came from.

How Carnival got to Eastern Parkway

Carnival is a pre-Lenten European masquerade tradition that arrived in Trinidad with French planters and was then taken over completely by the people it had excluded. After emancipation in 1838, freed Africans made the streets their own, and the Canboulay procession, named from the French for burnt cane, became the center of it, with stick fighting, drumming and masquerade that colonial authorities repeatedly tried to suppress. The Canboulay riots of the 1880s were about exactly that. When skin drums were banned, players moved to tuned lengths of bamboo, and from the bamboo bands came the steelpan, hammered out of discarded oil drums in the 1930s and 1940s.

The New York version started in Harlem. Caribbean immigrants held indoor carnival dances from the 1920s, and a street parade permit followed in the 1940s, organized largely by Trinidadian community figures. That Harlem parade ended in the mid-1960s after disturbances and a lost permit. Organizers regrouped in Brooklyn, where the Caribbean population was growing fast, and the first Eastern Parkway parade ran in 1969 under the West Indian American Day Carnival Association. It has run on Labor Day ever since and now draws crowds counted in the hundreds of thousands, preceded before dawn by J'ouvert, from jour ouvert, the older and rougher observance with mud, paint, oil and steelbands moving in the dark.

What the food is descended from

Several of the most recognizable Carnival dishes carry West African lineage, and the connections are specific rather than atmospheric.

• Sorrel, the deep red Christmas and Carnival drink, is made from the calyces of hibiscus sabdariffa, the same plant Senegalese kitchens brew as bissap and Nigerian kitchens as zobo. One plant, three names, three continents of use.
• Callaloo is a thick green built from leaves cooked down with okra and coconut milk, and it belongs to the enormous West African family of leaf stews. The word gumbo, used further north for a related idea, comes from a Bantu word for the okra pod.
• Pelau is a one-pot rice dish where the grain finishes in the seasoned liquid, which is the same architecture as jollof rice across West Africa, though its name points toward the Indian and Persian pilau.
• Pepper is not decoration. The scotch bonnet doing the work in jerk seasoning and in pepper sauce is the same species as the habanero, and the habit of a fierce pepper condiment served alongside instead of cooked in is common to both sides of the Atlantic.
• Ground provisions, the yam, dasheen, eddoe and cassava boiled and served as the starch of a plate, are a direct continuation of West African root cookery.

The leaf-stew connection in particular runs deeper than most people expect, and it is worked through properly in how cassava leaf and collard greens are cooked down.

The part people leave out

Carnival food is not only African-derived, and saying so is not a footnote. After emancipation, Trinidad and Guyana brought in enormous numbers of indentured laborers from India, and their descendants reshaped the food entirely. Doubles, roti, curried channa, dhalpuri and the whole curry vocabulary of Trinidadian street food come from that history, not from West Africa. Chinese, Portuguese and Syrian-Lebanese arrivals left their own marks.

So a plate assembled on Eastern Parkway on Labor Day might carry a West African rice technique, an Indian bread, a European braising method and a chile from the Americas, all at once. Flattening that into one origin story does the food a disservice. The interesting thing about Caribbean cooking is precisely that it refuses a single lineage.

Carnival and the neighborhood around it

Eastern Parkway runs through Crown Heights, and 1172 Park Place sits a short walk off it. For the households on these side streets, Carnival weekend is less a spectacle than a logistics problem: family arriving from out of town, houses full, and a lot of people to feed away from the parkway itself. The neighborhood's longer story, and how Caribbean, Southern and West African cooking ended up on the same streets, is in how Crown Heights came to eat the way it does.

FreeTown African & American Cuisine cooks West African and Southern food from that address and does not claim a stall, a float, a band or any role in the parade. What sits on the catering menu is the West African end of the family described above, including Pan Jollof Rice at $85 for a full pan, which is a cousin of the pelau on the parkway and not a copy of it. The two-tradition menu is explained in West African and soul food from one Crown Heights kitchen, and if you are feeding a house full of visiting family over the holiday, Labor Day weekend catering in Brooklyn is the practical page. Whether the kitchen is taking orders across Carnival weekend specifically is a question for 718-799-7160, not for a page written months ahead of it.