Eat: Trinidad’s Chinese Fusion Cuisine

William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

This weekend's meal takes us to the bottom corner of Port of Spain, in Trinidad, where Kevin Yarna and his father, Pancho, spend Fridays serving Chinese-style chicken at Pancho's Snackette, near the modern rise of the National Library.

William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop Stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

Flavor in balance: lime, oyster sauce and Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce.

Chinese-style chicken is a dish you can find all over Trinidad and within the diaspora that has followed the nation's emergence from British rule. The skin is fried into a lacquered mahogany. The meat beneath it tastes of five-spice, ginger and soy and is generally accompanied by a hum of oyster sauce mixed with the zing of the pickled Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce that is seemingly omnipresent on the island's tables.

The dish pays faint, mongrelized homage to the Chinese indentured servants who came to Trinidad in the 19th century to cut cane and harvest cacao when the British abolished African slavery but still needed chattel to do their work. The Chinese cooked their own food when they weren't slaving. All Trinidad — not just Caribs and Africans but also, as in Derek Walcott's description of the population, "the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle" — savored the result. Each group eventually made the cooking its collective own.

Yarna told me that Chinese-style chicken is among his best-selling menu items and that it has been for most of the storied restaurant's 17 years. That turns out to be the case in many places the dish is served. At the restaurant Trini-Gul, in Brooklyn, Chinese-style chicken is sold mostly on weekends and favors only those who can get to the small dining room early in the day or who call ahead for a special order. It gets ramcram in there, as the Trinis say. The chicken goes fast.

At Pancho's as at Trini-Gul, the technique for cooking the dish is basically the same: a chicken is marinated in dark soy sauce and five-spice powder overnight, then deep-fried whole in a giant pot of oil flavored with sesame. The chicken comes in pieces on a plate, with sauce on the side. Home cooks, though, can achieve much the same effect by cutting the chicken up beforehand or by buying chicken thighs and legs, marinating the pieces and pan-frying them in a lot less oil. The result is crisp, hardly oily, with terrific flavor. It pairs amazingly well with fried rice and cold beer: a taste of the polyglot islands.

Fresh lime is crucial to your success. All across the Caribbean, cooks use lime juice to clean their poultry, and it offers a tartness in the marinade for this dish that helps cut the saltiness of the soy. Do not stint on the lime. And a good hot sauce is required for the finishing sauce: something bright with Scotch bonnets or habaneros, vinegar, a slight hint of mustard. Among the best is Matouk's Soca, from National Canners in Trinidad (it is sold sporadically at Fairway Market in New York and is always available online). Matouk's is the Tabasco of the Lesser Antilles, manufactured in the small northern town of Arima. It is less salty than Jamaican hot sauces, less mustardy than Barbadian, without the almost unpalatable fire of Guyanese varieties. Jeremy Matouk, the company's courtly and voluble president, invokes the wine lover's idea of terroir to describe it. He told me that Trinidad's peppers "taste of the island itself."

This is absolutely true of the sauce in the following recipe. The addition of a Scotch-bonnet sauce (choose your own, but make sure it is fruity in its fire, with a rich aftertaste) to the funky salinity of a commercial Chinese oyster sauce is revelatory, a culinary mash-up of the very first order. Slathered on the crisp chicken, it becomes visible poetry, a joyous product of survival under hard odds.

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