Guyanese Pepperpot

Guyana's Christmas stew of beef simmered in cassareep, the boiled-down bitter cassava juice that both flavours it and keeps it for weeks

Origin: Georgetown & the Guianas

From the journey of Cassava.

Pepperpot is a stew of beef and, traditionally, other meats simmered for hours in cassareep, and cassareep is the whole dish. It is made by grating bitter cassava, pressing out the juice, and boiling that juice down for hours with cinnamon, clove, and sugar until it becomes a thick black syrup. The reduction is not merely for flavour: raw bitter cassava juice contains cyanogenic glycosides and is genuinely poisonous, and the long boil drives off the hydrogen cyanide and leaves something safe, dark, and bittersweet. That process is Amerindian. The Arawak and Carib peoples of the Guianas developed cassava processing, the grater board, the woven matapi press, and cassareep itself, and pepperpot is one of the clearest cases anywhere of an Indigenous American technique surviving intact as a national dish. Cassareep is also a preservative: a pepperpot pot kept in a cool place and brought back to the boil each day will keep for weeks without refrigeration, and households traditionally topped it up with fresh meat rather than finishing it. Pots kept going for years are part of Guyanese family lore. It is Christmas food above all. Guyanese households make it on Christmas Eve, eat it on Christmas morning with plait bread, and keep eating it for days, and it is the one dish that Guyanese abroad will go to considerable trouble to obtain. It is shared with Suriname and with the wider Guiana coast rather than belonging to one modern border. Cassareep cannot be substituted. Molasses gives the colour and none of the sourness or the clove-and-cinnamon bitterness; browning sugar gives neither. It is sold bottled by Caribbean grocers and there is no way round it.

Ingredients

Meat

  • 1.5 kg stewing beef, in large pieces
  • 500 g oxtail, in pieces
  • 500 g pork trotter or shoulder, in pieces

To prepare

  • 2 tbsp salt, for washing the meat
  • 2 limes, juiced, for washing the meat

Braise

  • 250 ml cassareep
  • 2 cinnamon sticks
  • 6 whole cloves
  • 1 large piece orange peel
  • 2 wiri wiri or scotch bonnet peppers, left whole
  • 1 thumb ginger, sliced
  • 4 sprigs thyme
  • 80 g soft brown sugar
  • 1.2 litres water

Seasoning

  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

Method

  1. Wash the meat in cold water with the salt and lime juice, rubbing it well, then rinse and dry it. This is standard Caribbean practice and it matters for a pot that will be kept for days.
  2. Put all the meat into a large heavy pot with the water and bring it to the boil, skimming carefully for the first ten minutes.
  3. Add the cassareep, cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, ginger, thyme, sugar, salt, and pepper, and stir until the pot goes uniformly dark.
  4. Drop in the whole peppers without piercing them. A pierced wiri wiri turns the pot fiercely hot; left whole it gives the fruity perfume the dish wants.
  5. Simmer, partly covered, for two and a half to three hours, until the meat is very tender and the liquid has reduced to a dark glossy sauce.
  6. Do not stir vigorously once it is simmering. Shake the pot instead, so the meat stays in pieces.
  7. Lift out the peppers before they burst, once the pot has taken enough of their scent.
  8. Taste and adjust the salt and the sugar. It should be dark, faintly bitter, faintly sweet, and sour underneath, all at once.
  9. If the sauce is still thin, uncover and reduce it for a further twenty minutes; it should coat the meat rather than pool round it.
  10. Rest the pot off the heat for half an hour before serving.
  11. To keep it in the traditional way, bring the whole pot back to a full boil once a day and store it covered somewhere cool, never in the refrigerator with meat added.
  12. Serve with plait bread or dense white bread, and expect it to be better on the third day than the first.

Notes

Cassareep is the dish and there is no substitute; buy it bottled from a Caribbean grocer. Wash the meat in lime and salt. Whole peppers, never pierced. Do not stir it hard. It improves for several days and the traditional keeping method is a daily boil rather than refrigeration, which works because cassareep is itself a preservative. A mixture of cuts, including something gelatinous like oxtail or trotter, is what gives the sauce its gloss. Pepperpot is Christmas food in Guyana and is eaten at breakfast as readily as at dinner.

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