Stir Fried: Mixed API chefs share their favorite fusion holiday meals

It’s a recurring theme for most chefs that some of their favorite childhood memories are centered on holiday meals. This is the time of year when the best cooks in the family come out to play, bringing dishes renowned throughout the family that we often only get to enjoy during Christmas or Thanksgiving. We stuff our faces with abandon, sharing memories of previous holiday meals with cousins and aunts. 

For this month’s Stir-Fried, to get into the holiday spirit, we interviewed three chefs we’ve previously featured about their favorite holiday meals and traditions. Warning: Reading this article may induce nostalgia and a hearty appetite.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Chef Craig Wong

Clara Wang: You have a huge extended Jamaican Chinese family in Canada. What do Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners look like?
Craig Wong: We roll pretty deep. We end up being about 30, 40 people around Thanksgiving. And Christmastime, the numbers will swell to like 60 plus. We always do it potluck style. One of my aunts, she’s got the casserole-style mac and cheese covered—she’s probably been doing that since the 70s. She does it with hard-boiled eggs, loaded with cheese. Not only cheese in the sauce but it’s cut into squares. One of my uncles will get a whole Chinese-style suckling pig, and that will be completely devoured. And fritters, we only have those at Christmas. 

Chef Craig Wong's holiday spread.

Courtesy of Craig Wong

Clara Wang: What are classic Jamaican or Jamaican Chinese foods on the holiday table?
Craig Wong: No Christmas breakfast is complete without ackee and saltfish. My family does it a bit differently as well—they’ll do ackee and saltfish and also add corned pork. They’ll corn it themselves, basically it’s like unsmoked bacon. Think corned beef, but pork belly. So it’s a salted, brined pork belly that’s fried and done with ackee and saltfish. That’s spectacular.

You’ll have Jamaican and Chinese traditional items both hitting the table at the same time. A whole Chinese roast pig right beside jerk pork. It’s that mix of North America, a bit of Carribean, a bit of Asian.

Clara Wang: What do you always go for first?
Craig Wong: I always look for fritters. I think everybody looks forward to the fritters. My aunt does them a very special way, it’s a cornstarch-based batter. It becomes shatteringly crispy, like glass, not like a bready consistency. She seasons the shrimp just right too. Each fritter gets a little bit of shrimp, a little bit of tomato, a little bit of scallion. It doesn’t even matter how much they make, they’ll all get consumed. Everybody has like eight or 10 of them, and that’s your fill of fritters for the year.

Clara Wang: What are some special memories you have around holiday meals?
Craig Wong: The most outstanding memories are the most recent ones. My kids now are starting to create their own memories of this Caribbean and Asian culture. It’s something I thought would get diluted. My wife is from Hong Kong. But my family is like her family. She’s become my family because we’ve been together since we were in high school. We grew up around the same people. Seeing my son now having the same experiences and loving the same things, it’s a very different experience. It’s almost like you’re outside of your own body and having an experience. Seeing him play with his cousins and having them get close.

Chef Devan Rajkumar

Clara Wang: What are some specific Guyanese Indian foods you eat during the holidays?
Devan Rajkumar: For any Guyanese person at Christmas time, the only thing they’re going to talk about is specifically pepper pot. That’s Guyana’s national dish. This is a meat-based stew utilizing the Amarindian ingredient cassareep. This is typically made before Christmas time or right at Christmas because everybody knows pepper pot tastes better when it is cooked a couple days in advance and it sits. Typically a large pot is made and it is reheated throughout the day. The cassareep acts as a preservative and then you just heat it up on the stove. Pepper pot is typically eaten with cassava bread or plait, which is weaved bread.

Chef Devan Rajkumar with his family for the holidays.

Suech and Bech

Another one is black cake, which is also known as fruit cake, holiday cake, Christmas cake. There are many different versions of this type of cake made throughout the world. It is very very popular throughout the Caribbean. When I think of Christmas in Guyana, I can smell the pepper pot. I can smell the cassareep, the cinnamon, the clove, the orange peel, the tannins. I can also smell black cake. Black cake has a very distinct aroma to it because of the fruits that are macerated in either wine or rum. And those warm, earthy, floral spices. There’s also burnt sugar, a deep, dark, slightly bitter caramel.

CW: What are some foods on your family’s holiday table?
DR: In my family growing up, my mom would cook roast chicken, or roast turkey, or roasted leg of lamb. Over the holidays, Indo Guyanese things that can be made are definitely jalebi, gulab yuman, mithai. Guyanese have a specific deep-fried piece of dough glazed in sugar called mithai. In India, “mithai” refers to a range of sweets, whereas in Guyana and Trinidad it refers to a very specific piece of fried dough.

Right around Thanksgiving is Diwali, celebrating light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over bad. Indo Guyanese preparations for Diwali include Guyanese seven curry. Guyanese seven curry is a collection of different dishes. Typically with guyanese seven curry, you’ll have a pumpkin curry, spinach curry, catahar (a variety of jackfruit), a potato curry, balange (eggplant), edoe, dal. 

Throughout India, around the time of Diwali celebrations, there is a good amount of people who will cook meat. However in Guyana, as far as I know, and my mom is very adamant on this as well as her side of the family, any type of celebration around Diwali, there will be no meat cooked. Guyanese associate religion, Hinduism and going to temple, with strictly being vegetarian. No eggs, dairy is okay.

We didn’t grow up in my house with beef or pork. A lot of Guyanese will consume meat, but there’s no beef or pork consumed, so she cooked a lot of lamb growing up. If we have Thanksgiving or Christmas, it’s a roasted leg of lamb with some type of potato side, lots of vegetables. I hated vegetables growing up but now in my later years any type of vegetables she cooks I’m all over it.