Grenada Beef Pepperpot

This rich, hearty Caribbean meat dish combines a variety of flavourful meats with molasses, nutmeg and hot peppers.

Pepperpot is a dish with all sorts of interpretations throughout the Caribbean islands. The most popular versions you’ll see will be Jamaican or Guyanese and they couldn’t be more different. Specifically, many Caribbean cooks, especially in the Lower Antilles (Barbados, Guyana, Grenada) will use a thick, dark sugar syrup called ‘cassareep’, made from cassava juice that’s boiled down with spices until caramelised. Cassareep was actually prepared by indigenous Amerindians in the Caribbean long before Europeans arrived, as they found that meats cooked in cassareep preserved extremely well without refrigeration. You may source cassareep online, but black treacle/molasses is virtually spot-on as a substitute and you’d struggle to tell a difference in this dish. This version of pepperpot is the Grenada version which I recently tried on a lecture assignment in the Caribbean, and it’s hallmarked by a substantial amount of nutmeg, for which Grenada is famous. It’s delicious, dark, bittersweet and perfect with rice. It’s also quite hot on account of scotch bonnet peppers, but you could use milder chillies. One last note - you can use any cuts of beef for pepperpot (short ribs/shin/oxtail) but I highly recommend adding a pig’s trotter also. Don’t be intimidated by it - a butcher is usually happy to give you one, they sometimes don’t even charge you for it. And they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch! Let’s go!