Limit two per customer.Īs a chef, culture writer, Trinidadian, and person obsessed with foods I can't have, I've gone to extreme lengths to secure this precious pod, traveling into the mountainous cocoa paynol enclaves to secure five or six, then mixing them into a bag of homemade granola replete with Brazil nuts, which are roughly the same size. In the UK and France, however, Trinidad tonka bean is sold to any gourmand willing to pay roughly a dollar for the one-inch seed. Now Trinidadians use something called "mixed essence," an entirely artificial substance that can even be found in Caribbean grocery stores in the U.S. Still, now that it is a forbidden fruit, few people use tonka in Trinidad, and those who do certainly don't admit to it. In all the years I traveled to the island with my Trinidadian father, I never heard of anyone dying from ingesting the small quantities of tonka used. But used traditionally, in micrograins to flavor cocoa tea, or steeped in rum to provide a unique scent and taste to baked goods, it surely cannot harm. Tonka bean contains coumarin, a blood thinner that, in large quantities, can be deadly. Once it was used to flavor tobacco, before the FDA determined that it contains a toxic substance and banned it for food import. Sometimes it is called "vanillin," a name that cheapens it for it is not a mere copy of vanilla but a self-contained microcosm of heady scent redolent of pear, warm spices, rich soil and, yes, vanilla. If you've ever bought a vanilla-scented candle or perfume, you know tonka bean. The seed is white and pulpy and must be allowed to dry, wizen and darken until it looks like an obscenely huge, hard, black raisin. Tonka bean grows in pods on an ancient hardwood tree valued for building and for smoking meats in the true Trinidadian boucanee (buccaneer) style. Cocoa remains king, particularly in the cocoa tea they drink - a mixture of pure cacao beans and local spices, like cinnamon, nutmeg, bay leaf, and tonka bean. These paynols - the cocoa Spanianards - still speak a smattering of old-world Spanish, their troubadour music is an entrenched part of local culture, and bush medicine is practiced here. Here live the descendants of the cocoa paynols (a pidgin version of the word cocoa espagnoles), laborers who came from Venezuela in the 18th century to pick the prized cacao that today lies mostly foundering in the fields as Trinidad's fortunes now come from its rich oil and gas reserves. The cool valleys in the crevices of these many peaks make ideal cocoa country: it's shady enough to protect Trinidad's prized trinatario cocoa, the world's finest cocoa, from the blistering equatorial sun. This mirage led Columbus to name the island La Trinidad, or the Trinity. From a boat far into the sea, the perspective and sheer size of these ranges make them loom large, appearing as three single peaks, when in fact they are razor-backed ridges that segregate the north, central, and southern regions of the island from each other. Trinidad has three mountain ranges, offshoots of the Andes that race from Venezuela, down the South American continent, from a Trinidad that was rent millennia ago.
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