What to Eat in Antigua, Cooked Straight From the Garden
What is a traditional Antiguan breakfast?
A traditional Antiguan breakfast is Sunday saltfish with chop up, a mash of garden vegetables cooked down and topped with sauteed onion, eaten slow with family. It is the heart of how the island eats.
“It’s the eggplant, maybe pumpkin, and some spinach chopped together,” Lorylin said of chop up. “It’s cooked, and then you saute some onion on top.” The spinach she had cut that morning. It is a dish defined by what is ripe in the garden that week, which is exactly why it tastes of somewhere, the same reason we rate the garden and farm eco stays across the Caribbean so highly.
What is Antiguan pepper pot?
Antiguan pepper pot, the everyday cousin of the Sunday breakfast, is a vegetable puree rather than the meaty stew the name suggests elsewhere. It is greens and squash cooked down into something simple and nourishing.
“It’s just a vegetable puree,” Lionel said. “We put spinach, eggplant, squash, pumpkin.” Most of it walked in from the beds that day, picked, washed and into the pot within the hour. That is food with zero miles on it, the opposite of the imported spread on an all inclusive plate.
What can you make from a coconut and green bananas?
A surprising amount, because coconut and green banana are the workhorses of the Antiguan kitchen, turned into sweets, dumplings, sides and salads. Lionel showed me the range from a single tree.
Coconut, sugar cake and dumpling
“That’s the coconut that I can grate,” he said of the dry ones. “I can make sugar cake. I can put it in dumpling,” flour and grated coconut rolled and boiled. Nothing about the nut is wasted, the same closed loop thinking behind the whole garden harvest here.
Green banana salad
Green bananas are not just for eating raw either. “We could take two of them and make a salad,” he said, “boil it in the skin, take out the skin, dice it, add mayonnaise or olive oil with a little paprika. And it’s a banana salad.” The rest he boils and mashes with a little butter.
Why does the right pea matter for rice and peas?
The right pea matters because it dyes the rice and carries the nutrients, which is why Lionel chases a particular purple pigeon pea and refuses the tinned kind. He is exacting about it.
“If I use that purple peas, my rice and peas, the colour becomes like purplish, and I like my rice like that,” he said. He will not use the tinned version, which he says has had the colour and the goodness boiled out of it. “I don’t like white rice. There’s no other nutrients in it.” It is a small thing that tells you everything about cooking from a garden you control, the ethic that runs through the certified sustainable stays we rate in the Caribbean.
What should you drink, and what will you miss?
You should try the breadfruit punch, the island drink most visitors never even hear about, blended from ripe breadfruit with water and milk. It is the one I am still thinking about.
“It becomes like a thickish kind of liqueur,” Lionel said, rum optional, and reckoned it close to sea moss. I did not get to try that one, which is one of the things you come back for. Food like this is the whole argument for a black owned, self catering stay over a resort, you eat what the island actually eats.
Can you cook all of this on a stay?
Yes, every apartment at Lamblion has its own kitchen, and the garden is the rest of the property, so you can pick, cook and eat the real Antiguan table yourself. That is the rare thing this stay offers, not a chef cooking island food at you, but the ingredients and the kitchen to make it your own way.
Lamblion is one of the best eco stays in Antigua and the wider sustainable hotels across the Caribbean. Read why you pick your own breakfast here, see the verified facts on the Lamblion listing, and book a stay through Expedia.
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