Stir Fried: Chef Devan Rajkumar gives a masterclass on Indo-Guyanese flavors
The restaurateur has studied his culture's cuisine his whole life to preserve its unique flavor combinations and cooking techniques
Words by Clara Wang
Stir Fried: The story of any immigrant diaspora is the story of how outsiders became insiders, and nothing tells this story better than food. Names may get scrambled, languages forgotten, neighborhoods gentrified—but no matter how muddled histories become, the truth is served on a plate. Stir Fried breaks down the weird, messy, bastardized fusion cuisines that tell the story of Asian diaspora communities around the world.
Toronto cum Guyanese Indian Chef Dev Rajkumar has gone through many phases in his life: Hindu temple kid, college dropout, burgeoning restaurateur. Along the way, he was always accumulating knowledge of Guyanese Indian cuisine, beginning from his days absorbing cooking tips from aunties at temple, to working at Toronto hotspots like Omaw and Terra and eventually owning the former Loch & Quay. He decided to continue his education by traveling around the world—and to share his knowledge everywhere he went.
Today, Rajkumar can be found on Canadian television screens as “Chef Dev,” showing audiences how to make parathas, teaching online cooking classes, and of course, on monthly trips to Southeast Asia and Guyana as he continues his never-ending quest to learn more. In addition, Mad Love, his 2024 cookbook homage to modern Guyanese Indian cooking, recently went into reprints. I was fortunate enough to catch him on the run while on his packed book tour for a masterclass, to chat about where it all began: the intricacies of Guyanese Indian cuisine.
Guyana is a tiny South American country, with a population of 790,000 people—less than a third of Toronto. Ninety percent of the population lives on a strip of the northern coastline facing the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the dense jungle and savannah of the interior uninhabited other than a few sparse tribes. A great example of Guyana’s unique cultural melding is its national dish, a meat-based stew called pepper pot, the base of which is cassareep, the extract of bitter cassava that has been boiled down with sugar and spices into a thick, viscous, molasses-like substance originally discovered by the Amerindians. It’s also made with wiri wiri peppers, native only to Guyana.
Many people mistake Guyana as part of the West Indies, due to its cultural proximity to Caribbean islands like Trinidad in the symbiosis of Indian, Indigenous, and African ethnic groups. The descendents of Indian indentured workers make up the largest ethnic group in Guyana at 40 percent, which has led to a cuisine rooted in South India, similar to Trinidad, with distinctive features.
“[Guyanese] say chicken curry or fish curry and Trinidadians say curry chicken,” Rajkumar says, regarding a distinguishing factor that’s treated like a long-running joke.
One distinctly Guyanese cooking method is the way they approach chunkay, which stems from the Hindi word “chunk,” and refers to a tempering process with hot oil used to finish dal. Indian cuisine uses a multitude of ingredients, such as cumin seeds, curry leaves, and red chilies. In Guyanese cuisine, dal is tempered specifically with thinly sliced garlic and cumin seeds. Guyanese also have a penchant for cooking outdoors over an open flame on clay stoves, in large vessels called karahis, techniques that have been brought to the small nation from India.
“Anybody in Guyana, any diaspora, will tell you the food will always taste the best when it's cooked on fireside cooking,” Rajkumar says. “The tandoor that is used to cook in Indian cuisine, you don’t really see in Guyanese cuisine.”
Guyanese Indian cuisine also leans heavily on a combination of cumin powder (which is toasted to be darker and more aromatic), garam masala, curry powder, and turmeric, as well as fresh hot peppers, rather than red chili powder.
Cassava, plantain, and edo are much more commonly found in Guyanese cooking than Indian cooking. They don’t have dosas or biryanis, but do have a similar dish called cook-up rice, a hearty, risotto-like dish mixed with tender bits of protein and simmered in coconut milk and aromatics.
“And we also have a very similar [rice dish] call khichri. This comes from India in the form of khichdi. A lot of times, what I notice in Guyanese food and culture is that they’ll take things from India, and the name changes a bit over time. Another great example of that is the pot that we use, the large, wide pot. It's called a karahi, or a karai, like K-A-R-A-H-I, but in Guyana, they call it ‘karhee.’ Same thing with the tava, which is the hot plate. We call it a tawa,” Rajkumar tells me. “Sometimes over time things get a little bit lost in translation, I mean, that’s bound to happen when you literally transplant someone from one continent to another and 100 or 150 years go by.”
In Mad Love, Rajkumar highlights both traditional recipes for parsad (a Guyanese dessert made with milk, parched flour, ghee, sugar, and spices that’s served on holidays and at religious functions), dal, and roti, as well as his own take on childhood comfort foods, such as a palak paneer spanakopita.
“Palak paneer is a spinach stew or curry with paneer, an Indian type of cheese…it’s one of my favorite curry dishes of all time. It’s very comforting. Very warming to the heart. So there's a recipe in the book where I take that and I reduce it down a little bit further, cool it down, add feta and dill, and then I put it into filo pastry. Because one day I was sitting there and I'm like, ‘Palak paneer is spinach and cheese. Another one of my favorite things is spanakopita. It's spinach and cheese, right?’ So I thought, ‘Why not put those two together?’”
It’s a cliché, but a quixotic truth, that many creatives often find their career arc defined by coming full circle back to where it all began—and that’s where Rajkumar finds himself.
“I was having trouble finding my voice and what I really stood for,” he says about the beginning of his career working in the restaurant industry. “Now, if you ask someone, ‘Who is Chef Dev?’ they'll tell you, ‘Oh man, that's a Guyanese chef, or that's a Caribbean chef…It’s synonymous with me.’”
By preserving his own family recipes, Rajkumar is also helping younger generations of Guyanese Indian immigrants reconnect with their heritage. For those who don’t have an “amazingly patient” immigrant mother who is “always willing to teach” like his own, it can sometimes be frustrating trying to learn recipes from parents who often cook by feel and may not have the patience to teach (or for ruined meals).
“We have kids that now have access to these older recipes, whether it's metemgee or pepper pot or cook-up, and they’re my grandmother’s recipes living on, 100 years later,” Rajkumar says.
Published on September 11, 2024
Words by Clara Wang
Clara Wang is a freelance writer based in Austin, TX but often found wandering abroad exploring culture through the lens of food and drink. Her work has been featured in publications such as Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, Eater Austin, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, the Austin American Statesman, and the Daily Dot. Her monthly column Stir Fried explores Asian diasporic cuisines around the world.
Art by Ryan Quan
Ryan Quan is the Social Media Editor for JoySauce. This queer, half-Chinese, half-Filipino writer and graphic designer loves everything related to music, creative nonfiction, and art. Based in Brooklyn, he spends most of his time dancing to hyperpop and accidentally falling asleep on the subway. Follow him on Instagram at @ryanquans.