Fry-Baked in NYC

I loved Fry-Bake. The first time I tried it was when I visited my friend Brian Kissoon’s house for the night. It is essentially a small circle of wheat and flour, a hard bread, fried in oil to give a light crunch, similar to the Indian puri. While I was eating, I realized that, despite how delicious fry-bake was, it wasn’t fry-bake itself which interested me, but the Trinidadian who made the dish. And that’s how Brian and I started talking.

Brian was born on 1980 in Gasparillo, a small town located in the southern Trinidad. This town, where he spent thirteen years of his life, was a moderately populated suburban area. Everyone lived in houses, with enough room for a front and back yards, where each family would grow citrus fruits or raise chickens, ducks, and even dogs. The community where Brian lived was very family-oriented; Brian’s uncles, grandparents, and extended relatives lived on the same block he lived. During Brian’s time, Gasparillo served as a home for a large Christian, Muslim and Hindu population, all of whom coexisted quite remarkably – no matter what religion you belonged to, you celebrated all holidays– Christmas, Eid, and Diwali. There was a strong sense of community even amongst non family-members, which would manifest as financial help, festival gatherings, etc.

Then, when Brian was 13, his father and mother decided to move to the Bronx, New York in order to give their children a better education and better life. At first, Brian was excited. His only experience of America, at that time, was the Western Hollywood movies which he watched from time to time. He considered America only what it was advertised to be, the land of opportunity. Little was he prepared for the culture shock that would await.

Brian’s first culture shock came to him when he attended 8^th grade in CIS Diana Sands Junior High School. There was no school uniform. But more importantly, there was very little respect given from students to the teacher, and there were no disciplinary actions the school implemented to control the kids. In Trinidad, students had school uniforms which they cleaned every day. The teacher was respected by students, and students were expected to behave in the hallways or in the classroom. Yet, there was nothing of that sort in CIS middle school. In William Howard Taft high school, kids were the same, and Brian often got picked on for doing his work quietly in a corner. His only friends in high school were immigrant kids who understood the culture shock Brian was going through.

Brian’s next struggle was the divorce of his parents. In Trinidad, divorce rarely occurred in a culture that heavily emphasized the importance of family. Certainly Brian couldn’t understand why this was happening, as literally no one in Brian’s past family history had ever divorced their spouse. Brian’s parents were the first, and Brian was devastated. As he put it, this was when reality had started to kick in. The overwhelming importance of maintaining a nuclear family and respecting your elders just did not hold that much value in New York City, and Brian had to learn that the hard way.

The effects of these events on Brian’s life were that Brian became more independent and reserved. He no longer lives with his relatives anymore, but lives by himself with his daughter. He learned how to survive in New York City financially. Now he lives in Soundview, Bronx in the lower room of a duplex house. He takes the 6 train everyday to go to Times Square, where he works in a Bar Review company. He keeps many of his Trinidadian customs alive, most notably by his cooking – when he made a Trinidadian dish called Fry-Bake for me when I visited his house of the first time. But his native value for family wholeness was torn away by his New York City experience and replaced with a foreign value of independence, which he deals with now.

Here are some dishes Brian regularly makes.

Pastel

Doubles