This Christmas, we’ve joined forces with Tanty Darlene for an afternoon of festive fun at our first ever pastelle making party! Guests will be led, instructor-style, step by step, through the technique of pastelle making, alongside a reading of a paired Caribbean Christmas story, and a sampling of holiday refreshments.

A Trinidadian Christmas culinary staple, pastelles are a decadent savory dish of multiple origins and influences. Pastelles, a gift from Trinidad’s Amerindian and Spanish heritage, are a cornmeal pocket stuffed with minced beef, highly seasoned, with capers and olives among the essential ingredients. Up the island chain, its not-so-distant cousins also enjoy equal infamy during the festive season in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

Pastelle making is the kind of tradition where its execution varies from household to household. Pastelle recipes often live behind the veil of preferred ingredients and carefully guarded family secrets. Pastelles, despite its many iterations, all have one thing in common. Its process is preparation and labor intensive, usually an affair that assembles an inter-generational community of workers. Hallowed family recipes are retrieved - from journals or memory - for the upcoming production line of deft hands working in syncopated precision, oiling, singeing leaves, chopping, seasoning, pressing, filling, steaming.

Here in Brooklyn, we are going to recreate, with some diaspora innovations, the ritual of pastelle production, under the expert gaze and tutelage of Tanty Darlene, whose personal formula and process has brought joy to her family and countless clients for decades.

Our pastelle making divided into acts (production phases) will be paired with a story, with each phase being heralded in by a reading from Barbara Jenkins’ tender story, ‘Making Pastelles in Dickensland’. The story, part of the collection, ‘Sic Transit Wagon’, chronicles the story of a family’s final year of pastelle-production in London, and is a panegyric to the bonds of family, the importance of ritual, and the exchanges of love between a husband, wife and their children. Equally as important, is its genius treatment of how traditions modify when subjected to the tectonic pressures of migration and diaspora living. 

Group discussion is welcome.

Each Registered guest will leave with half a dozen pastelles of his/her own making, a copy of Sic Transit Wagon, and a spirit full of good cheer, Caribbean style.

Additional pastelles will be available for sale from Tanty Darlene on our party day.