Sun-washed pastel cottages. Sparkling white-sand beaches lapped by crystal-clear turquoise-blue water. Coconut palms rustling in the island breeze ... The Caribbean may conjure up all of these images — visions that lure millions of tourists to the islands to soak up the sun. But the Caribbean region has another tempting tropical quality that's being transported to America — its food.

The spicy, fruit flavors of this island cuisine are no longer marooned in the Caribbean. The hot fare migrated to the mainland decades ago. But it is only recently that mainstream restaurants began to embrace the cuisine. In fact, Caribbean food, or New World Cuisine as it's been dubbed, is currently all the rage in some of South Florida's better restaurant kitchens. This highly flavored food is heating up menus in other major markets, too, such as New York, Washington DC and Houston, as it continues its slow burn across America. Following in the footsteps of Cajun and Southwestern cuisine, Caribbean cooking may be the next searing sensation in ethnic restaurant fare.

Like other popular regional cuisines, Caribbean cooking is not only flavorful but flexible, too. Island cooking relies on basic ingredients cooked in simple ways. After all, it originated, as most cuisines we enjoy today did, with mothers and grandmothers in the family kitchen making use of whatever they had on hand. Its flexibility makes Caribbean cooking ideal for restaurants of all types. So, if you're looking to spice up your menu with new flavors and unusual ingredients, a few Caribbean dishes might be just the thing.

A hodgepodge history

Caribbean cuisine is so flexible and multifaceted that it defies a simple definition. If you ask most Americans to describe Caribbean food, they'd probably say it's Cuban black beans and rice or Puerto Rican chicken and rice or Jamaican jerk (slow-grilled meat rubbed or marinated with a blend of seasonings).

There are two reasons for such narrow answers. First, Americans tend to be more familiar with Cuban and Puerto Rican dishes because Cubans and Puerto Ricans immigrated to the states long before Haitians, Nicaraguans, and the more recent and varied wave of Latin American immigrants. Because we still don't have many Barbadians and Grenadians living in the United States, their cuisine is more foreign to American palates. Second, U.S. tourists are more likely to have visited the nearby Caribbean hot spots of Jamaica and Puerto Rico, as opposed to Guadeloupe or Curacao, and assume they know Jamaican and Puerto Rican food (which usually is not the case if they've never ventured outside their hotel dining room).

But it's not just American diners who have trouble defining Caribbean food. At last year's Caribbean Culinary Federation Culinary Competition, held in Puerto Rico, there was a lot of debate among island chefs themselves about "What is Caribbean cuisine?" Is it one-pot, peasant-style grandma cooking? Is it the use of local ingredients? Or an island cooking technique combined with an uptown flair to attract a sophisticated tourist palate? The answer seems to be a little of all of those, flavored with a unique twist of local color and taste from each Caribbean country.

The main reason Caribbean cuisine is so hard to describe is that there is no one type of food unique to the region. Like American cuisine, Caribbean cooking is based on a melting-pot heritage. Ever since Columbus made the first trip across the big pond, there have been steady and ever-changing influences on food in the Caribbean. The centuries-long simmering of tastes and cultures can be boiled down to four major influences. The islands' original inhabitants, the Arawak and Carib Indians, were the first Caribbean cooks to fill and flavor their dishes with sweet potatoes and arrowroot and were the first folks to barbecue. By the end of the 15th century, the Europeans had landed — first the Spanish, then the Dutch, the French, the British and the Danish, to name just the major players — bringing with them the flavors and fashions of their own kitchens. The Europeans also brought African slaves, who introduced okra, callaloo and African cooking techniques to the New World. Once emancipation came to the islands, around 1850, Indians and Chinese arrived to work as servants and brought with them curry, rice, vegetables and soy sauce.

A tropical harvest of heat and spice

Over the centuries, Caribbean cooks have tinkered with history's basic influences, adding their own touches to the pot. But while the islands, as well as parts of Mexico and the South American and Central American countries of the Caribbean region, have their own distinct dishes, they share many flavors and ingredients, most of which can be found in the natural bounty of the region. As diverse as the individual nations may be, they share the same climate, the same ocean and — in the case of the islands — limited land mass to plant crops or graze cattle.

What the islands lack in land mass, however, they make up for in flavor. Caribbean flavors include lime, allspice, nutmeg, curries, thyme, ginger and chilies, in varying degrees of heat. Many of those are basic ingredients, common to cooking around the world; but Caribbean cooks use them in unusual and unexpected ways.

For example, in American cooking, allspice and nutmeg are typically reserved for carrots, pumpkin, sweet potatoes and desserts to develop a sweet flavor profile. Chilies are frequently used to spice up salsas, side dishes and meaty main dishes. Not so in the islands. Allspice is one of the key ingredients in Jamaican jerk, lending contrast to the fiery scotch-bonnet peppers. In Grenada, one of the world's largest producers of nutmeg, that spice is combined with garlic, scallions, ginger or herbs. It works wonders in a savory sauce or salsa. And in one popular Cayman Islands dessert, scotch-bonnet peppers add a kick to chocolate cake.

The bounty and versatility of native tropical fruits deserve a story all to themselves. Most American chefs aren't used to cooking with pinks, purples and corals, but it's easy when you use mamey, papaya, mango and guava. Cooking with colorful Caribbean fruit can bring all the vibrancy of an island sunset into any kitchen.

Like that sunset, however, the tropical flavors are elusive and difficult to describe. Some fruits, like plantains and papaya, are virtual chameleons. When green and unripe, plantains can be sliced paper thin, fried and salted to make savory chips or added to stews like a vegetable. But when plantains ripen and turn black, they're incredibly sweet-and ideal as a sauteed side dish or pureed and added to sweet potatoes. Hard, green papaya is often shredded for chutney or relish, but when ripe, soft and juicy, papaya becomes the centerpiece of a sweet-spicy salsa or a dessert.

The Caribbean produce market also includes many starchy vegetables. Popular tropical tubers include boniato, a white-fleshed sweet potato with a red skin that gets as crusty as a hard pretzel when it's baked. Oblong-shaped malanga and yucca look similar, with barklike outer coatings; they can be fried, boiled in stews, or pureed and used as natural thickeners, because of their high starch content. Americans are most familiar with yucca in its processed form — tapioca. Yams are also common ingredients in island fare, although a Caribbean yam is quite different from its U.S. counterpart. In the tropics, yam refers to a hairy brown tuber with white-yellow flesh that is used like malanga or yucca, not the sweet, orange-fleshed potato Americans often find candied on their holiday tables. Other less-common Caribbean tubers include taro, or dasheen, and breadfruit.

Besides tubers, Caribbean cooks use a wide variety of other starchy staples, which absorb the tropical flavors and add texture to many dishes. It's not pasta that fills out the plate in this part of the world but legumes and rice. Cornmeal is also popular, cooked as a soft, pudding-like polenta or as a bread. And no discussion of Caribbean cuisine would be complete without mentioning the heavy emphasis on beans. Puerto Ricans use red beans, Cubans prefer black beans, while Bahamians cook with pigeon peas (also known as gandules or goongoo peas).

Main dishes that make more from less

Just as Caribbean cuisine's tropical flavors come from what the land provides, so too do its main dishes. Traditional Caribbean main dishes rely heavily on chicken, pork and goat. Beef is more popular on the larger islands, such as Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe and the Dominican Republic, which have the land mass to support grazing.

Even when meat is on the menu, it may not be the highest-quality, tenderest cut. But by boiling, braising, stewing and jerking, Caribbean cooks turn inexpensive beef cuts, tough hens and old goats into soothing comfort dishes such as "Ropa Vieja" (shredded beef and savory sauce), "Arroz con Pollo" (rice with chicken) and "Curried Goat Stew." Dishes common to many of the islands include lots of one-pot meals, especially rice and beans with chicken, pork or fish, which allow flavors and textures to merge and simmer simultaneously, enhancing all the ingredients.

Other simple Caribbean dishes include poached fish in a clear broth, known as "Blaff" or "Court Bouillon" (not to be confused with the classic French poaching liquid); baked or deep-fried meat-filled turnovers, such as empanadas and pastelitos; deep-fried dough fritters often mixed with beans or codfish; and a variety of grilled marinated meats and vegetables.

Surrounded by water, one would expect Caribbean cooks to have a wealth of seafood at their fingertips. And to some degree, that's true, if they're feeding a family or operating a small mom-and-pop cookshack on the beach. But chefs in tourist restaurants or hotel kitchens have a higher demand and a lower seafood supply. Although the Caribbean Sea is well stocked with hog snapper, lane snapper, black grouper, yellowtail, dolphin, wahoo, swordfish, tuna, shrimp and crabs, the islands have a poorly organized fishing industry.

Large resorts doing high-volume business need quality control and consistent supply, so many Caribbean restaurateurs turn stateside for their seafood supply. Because the waters off Florida have species similar to those found in the Caribbean Sea, Florida seafood purveyors do big business air-shipping seafood to the Caribbean. Most island tourists would be shocked if they knew that the fish they're having for dinner probably flew in on the same plane they did.

Bringing the islands to your kitchen

Fortunately, for American restaurateurs — and American diners — it's getting easier to cook up true Caribbean cuisine in American kitchens. Exotic fresh produce is becoming more common thanks to a better distribution network. Multifaceted companies now grow, import and distribute unusual fruits and vegetables, making many items available to U.S. chefs almost year-round. And some produce need not be fresh to add relish to a dish. For example, the perfumed essence of passion fruit or guava can be captured by using readily available frozen or canned juice. And tart tamarind, a key flavor in Worcestershire sauce, comes in a paste-like form, packaged in tins or plastic bags, already sweetened. Once you begin cooking Caribbean, you will undoubtedly need more advice on proper storage, handling and preparation of new produce ingredients. A good resource book to have on your shelf is Elizabeth Schneider's The Guide to Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables.

Caribbean cuisine's festival of flavors, comforting cooking techniques and unusual tropical ingredients can add spice and excitement to an existing menu or stand on their own as a totally new menu concept from cocktails to dessert. So give your customers a taste trip to the Caribbean and watch your sales heat up.

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