The smell reaches you before the sound does. Somewhere off Ladbroke Grove a jerk drum is going, that oil-barrel-cut-in-half smoke that gets into your coat and stays there until Wednesday. Then the bass. Then a wall of people.
This year Notting Hill Carnival turns sixty, and it is worth saying plainly what it is: the largest street festival in Europe, built by Caribbean people in a part of London that did not want them, and now the one weekend a year when British Caribbean food is unarguably the main event.
Sixty years, and a longer story than that
The sixtieth counts from 1966, when Rhaune Laslett of the London Free School organised an outdoor festival in Notting Hill meant to bring together the many communities living there. Henderson's steelband walked down Portobello Road and people came out of their houses and followed it. That is the moment the street carnival dates from.
But the story starts earlier, indoors, and much darker. In January 1959 the activist and editor Claudia Jones organised a Caribbean carnival in St Pancras Town Hall. The months before had been brutal: racist attacks across Notting Hill in 1958, and in May 1959 the murder of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan carpenter, on a street corner in Notting Dale. Jones's carnival was an answer to that. A community saying, in public and in colour, that it was here and it was staying.
So sixty years of the street festival, and nearly seventy of the idea. Both anniversaries are worth knowing, because the food that turns up every August Bank Holiday carries that whole history in it.
Jerk is king, and it earned the crown
Over three hundred food stalls set up across the route, and the undisputed centre of them is jerk chicken. Not a version of it, not an interpretation. Jamaican jerk, cooked over pimento wood and charcoal in a split oil drum, the marinade heavy with scotch bonnet and allspice, the skin gone lacquered and black at the edges.
Alongside it: Trinidadian roti, folded around curried goat or chickpea and potato. Guyanese pepperpot, dark with cassareep and slow with clove. Ackee and saltfish. Rice and peas cooked in coconut milk. Festival dumplings, sweet and fried. Sorrel and ginger beer sold from crates of ice.
This is a proper canon and it deserves its status. Britain learned Caribbean food through the Jamaican and Trinidadian kitchens, and learned it well.
The islands that never made it onto the plate
Here is the thing I notice every year, standing in that crowd.
The Caribbean has more than thirty inhabited islands and territories. At Carnival, Britain tastes two or three of them.
Guadeloupe and Martinique are the same sea, an hour's flight from Antigua, and almost entirely absent. You will not easily find colombo at Carnival, the curry that arrived in the French Antilles with indentured Indian workers in the 1850s and became its own thing, softer and more aromatic than its Trinidadian cousin. You will not find sauce chien, the raw sauce of lime, parsley, garlic and scotch bonnet that we spoon over grilled fish, named after the knife it was chopped with. No bokit, the fried bread pocket sold on beaches in Guadeloupe. No accras de morue, salt cod fritters, though every Caribbean island has its own version and ours is very good.
This is not a complaint about Carnival. Carnival reflects who came, and Britain's Caribbean migration was overwhelmingly from the anglophone islands, for reasons written into empire. The French Antilles sent their people to Paris instead. That is why a Guadeloupean in London is a rarer thing, and why our food never got its stall.
What the French Caribbean would bring to the drum
If you have only met Caribbean food through jerk, the French Antillean table would still feel familiar, and then it would surprise you.
The same scotch bonnet is at the centre of it. We call it piment antillais, or more rudely piment bonda man Jacques, and it does the same work: fruit first, fire second. The same thyme, the same allspice, the same reverence for a slow pot.
What differs is the accent. French technique got into the cooking and stayed there. Court-bouillon is not a poaching liquid here but a whole dish, fish simmered in a tomato and lime broth. Colombo is built on a masala of coriander, turmeric, mustard seed and fenugreek, ground fresh, and it is gentler than jerk without being timid. Sauce chien is served raw and cold onto something hot off the fire, which is a completely different idea from a marinade cooked in.
Put simply: the anglophone islands gave Britain smoke and heat. The French islands would have given it herbs, lime and a lighter hand.
Cooking it this weekend, wherever you are
Half a million people will be on the streets of west London this Bank Holiday. Most of the country will not be. If you are cooking at home and want the French Caribbean on the table alongside the jerk, three things travel well:
- Sauce chien over anything grilled. Chop parsley, spring onion, garlic and a little scotch bonnet, cover with lime juice, a splash of hot water and oil, let it sit twenty minutes. Spoon it cold onto hot fish or chicken.
- Colombo instead of curry goat. Same slow braise, different spice, and it will feel like something you have almost had before.
- Accras with the first drink. Salt cod fritters, made small, eaten hot standing up in the kitchen. This is how the day starts in Guadeloupe.
Sixty years on, Carnival is the most confident statement of Caribbean presence Britain has. It would only get richer for having more of the sea on the plate.
If you want to start somewhere, read the story of sauce chien, or the guide to the scotch bonnet that sits at the centre of every island's cooking, ours included.