Bajan Food From Harbourfront Centre, Toronto - Fishcakes, Pudding & Souse
Fishcakes, Pudding and Souse - Bajan Food From Barbados On The Water Festival
Barbados On The Water Festival is held at Harbourfront Centre on the shores of Lake Ontario in Downtown Toronto. Among other things, Barbadian (Bajan) food is sold there.
Barbadian food is hard to find in Toronto (not sure about other cities with relatively big Barbadian populations like London, New York, and Miami). But at the festival, temporary restaurants sell traditional Bajan foods like pudding and souse, deserts like turnovers (not the same as the turnovers sold in Canadian bakeries), rice and peas, fishcakes, fried fish, conkies, etc.
I remember reading about a Barbadian restaurant being opened in Toronto a long time ago, but I don't think its around anymore (probably for the reasons I gave above). There was also one in Scarborough (east Toronto) serving a mix of Bajan and Cajun food. It had some decent fishcakes. I think it was called the Cajun Bajan, but I'm not sure if its still around.
There don't seem to be any specialized restaurants serving nothing but Bajan food, but there seem to be a couple of places in Toronto that have some Bajan dishes on the menu. Among them are Bacchus Roti Shop (on 1376, Queen St. W. in Parkdale). From what I remember, they advertised themselves as serving Guyanese and Bajan food, but I didn't see many Bajan stuff on their menu. Street Shak on 646 Queen St. W. has Bajan fishcakes on their menu but I've never tried them and didn't know about the place.
Most of the Anglo Caribbean restaurants in Toronto focus on Jamaican food, probably cause Canada's population of Jamaican descent is relatively big. Jamaica's the most population English-speaking Caribbean country and people of Jamaican descent in Canada numbered 256,915 in 2011, with the bulk of them concentrated in the Greater Toronto Area. Jamaican Canadians make up about 30% of the total Black Canadian population. There are also some Trinidadian restaurants in Toronto (Canada had about 68,000 people of Trinidad and Tobago origin in 2011, making them the 3rd biggest Anglo Caribbean ethnic group in Canada after Jamaican and Guyanese Canadians, the latter numbering 73,345 in 2011).
I got pudding and souse and fishcakes from the Barbados On The Water Festival at Harbourfront. I fried the plantain myself at home. The food was pretty expensive and the lineups were long, but it was worth it because you can't usually buy Bajan food here. There were 3 or 4 different places selling roughly the same food, with slightly different prices. I didn't try them all. Pudding and souse is a Barbadian delicacy traditionally eaten at special occasions like Christmas.
Bajan fishcakes are made with saltfish (salted cod or salt cod), flour and spices that are fried up. Codfish only live in cold North Atlantic waters (they were fished in large numbers in Newfoundland, Canada, parts of the Northeastern US, and Scandinavia- Iceland, Faroe Islands, Norway). But the fish used to be very cheap and easy to preserve by salting and drying it before the advent of refrigeration. So salted cod was widely exported from Newfoundland to the Caribbean as a cheap food. So it became widely used in Caribbean cooking- you have dishes like coucou and saltfish and fishcakes in Barbados, ackee and saltfish in Jamaica, saltfish and potatoes in Bermuda, saltfish and bakes, and so on.
The fishcakes weren't the best I've ever tasted. They were mostly flour, without much cod. Codfish used to be cheap but now its expensive. Codfish used to be very common and easy to catch, with massive schools of them in places like Newfoundland's Grand Banks. But codfish populations collapsed in Newfoundland and elsewhere, so now this once cheap and abundant fish has become expensive. I'm guessing they tried to save money but not putting a lot of cod in the fishcakes. The good thing, however, is the fishcakes were cheap. They didn't taste bad, but, like I said, I was disappointed by the limited amount of actual codfish in them. The pudding and souse was pretty good. It wasn't too hot or spicy, but had the 'right' flavour. I'd give the fishcakes a 6/10 and the pudding and souse an 8/10.
Tags: Barbados, Barbadian, Bajan, souse, pudding, fishcakes, Harbourfront Centre, food, cuisine, West Indies, Caribbean, West Indian, Eastern Caribbean, Lesser Antilles, Toronto, Greater Toronto Area, Downtown Toronto, Lakefront, Lake Ontario, Ontario, Canada, Golden Horseshoe, black pudding, pudding and souse, Lakeshore, Toronto Harbour, festival
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