The Trinidadian wet marinade of spring onion, chadon beni, thyme, and hot pepper that begins every dish
Origin: Trinidad & Tobago
From the journey of Spring Onion.
Nothing in a Trinidadian kitchen is cooked without this, and most households have a jar of it in the refrigerator at all times. Green seasoning is a blended wet paste rather than a dry rub, and spring onion is its largest single component by volume. Trinidadians call spring onion chive, which defeats visiting cooks reliably, since true chives are a different plant altogether. Alongside it go chadon beni, thyme, garlic, and hot pepper, blended with a little vinegar or water into a coarse green slurry. Chadon beni is the ingredient hardest to explain and hardest to replace. Botanically it is Eryngium foetidum, culantro, a long sawtooth-edged leaf that tastes like coriander turned up considerably; the Trinidadian name is a corruption of the French chardon béni, blessed thistle. Coriander is the usual substitute and gets perhaps two-thirds of the way. The practice of keeping a wet seasoning in bulk and marinating everything in it before cooking is West African in instinct rather than European, and the ingredients are what the Caribbean supplied. Meat and fish are rubbed with it and left for hours or overnight, and what emerges is seasoned right through rather than merely on the surface. Jamaican jerk paste works on the same principle with a different herb balance. Every family's version differs, quantities are never written down, and asking a Trinidadian for the recipe produces a shrug and a handful of something.
Chadon beni (culantro, Eryngium foetidum) is sold at Caribbean and Southeast Asian grocers, the latter under the Vietnamese name ngò gai or as sawtooth herb. Coriander is the standard substitute; use about half again as much and include the stalks. The proportions are a starting point rather than a rule. Every Trinidadian household has its own balance, and more thyme or more chadon beni are both entirely legitimate directions. It keeps for a month refrigerated under a film of oil, and freezes very well in an ice cube tray, which is the practical way to store it. Use it on chicken before stewing or currying, on fish before frying, in pelau, in callaloo, and stirred into rice and peas. A spoonful in a pot of stewed beans transforms them. Omit the Scotch bonnet for a mild version. The paste is used in such quantity that one whole pepper in a batch this size is noticeable but not fierce.
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