Belizean Cuisine

Belizean cuisine is one of the most joyful and underappreciated food cultures in the Western Hemisphere — a small nation's extraordinary synthesis of Maya, Garifuna, Creole, Mestizo, East Indian, Chinese, and British colonial traditions compressed into a country smaller than New Hampshire. The Maya have farmed this land for three thousand years and their food — corn tortillas, black beans, tamales, chirmole — forms the bedrock of the national diet. The Garifuna people, descendants of Island Caribs and West Africans who were exiled to the Caribbean coast by the British, brought coconut-based cooking and seafood traditions of astonishing depth. The Belizean Creole community created the iconic rice and beans — not mixed together but cooked separately, the beans in coconut milk — that serves as the national Sunday dish. The result of this layering is a cuisine that is simultaneously Caribbean, Central American, and entirely itself: stewed chicken with a recado red paste, hudut (Garifuna fish and coconut soup), sere de pescado, garnaches (fried corn tortillas with refried beans), and johnnycakes eaten at breakfast by the sea. Belize is small. Its food is enormous.