“It’s beach food,” she added. “If you are going to lime beach [event]or after harvest in church, if you want to celebrate something that is essentially Tobago, you will eat crab and dumplings.”
I was eager to try it myself and luckily Clark and I caught six crabs using his homemade wooden boxes with lids. In the forest he had pointed out several small depressions in the sandy floor: these were the burrows of the crabs, near a stream. As he set the traps, squeezing a mango plucked from a nearby tree around the holes to lure them in, he told me that early evening is the best time to catch land crabs, when he can sometimes catch dozens at once. When we returned later that evening, we found six manicue crabs in the traps, which he showed me how to hold safely by avoiding their fronts, telling me that “their bites are like knives.”
To cook them, we headed to Clark’s yellow-striped restaurant, Marguerite’s, located just behind the beach in Castara, a remote Tobago village that prides itself on authentic Caribbean cuisine. Marguerite’s is one of the best places to eat crab and dumplings in Tobago. Sherwin comes from a long line of chefs: his parents run one of the village’s open-air ovens, and two of his brothers also own restaurants. His grandmother taught him the recipe, he told me, and he’s been crabbing since he was a kid.
In his yellow-painted kitchen, with pots hanging on the walls and lace curtains on the windows, Clark showed me the dough he had made for the dumplings, a mixture of cornmeal, wheat flour, and water. He marinated the crabs in ginger and garlic and started the sauce by pouring in a ladle of vegetable oil to heat with a clove of garlic, then added curry powder mixed with a little water, which sizzled in the oil, sending up an aroma of mingling spices. Once the sauce started to boil, Clark added the crabs and a drizzle of ketchup, followed by a quart of coconut milk.
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