Creole Seasoning and Sauce

I’m sure many of you have come across “Creole Seasoning” Its kind of a general flavouring associated with the Caribbean especially the islands which were colonised by France at one point or another.

The word Creole simply means a person born in a colony of European ancestry. So, as most of my ancestors were French who fled their country escaping the revolution around 1790, I am a French Creole. But as I am West Indian, my gene pool is nothing short of a Pot Pourri. I’ve got Celtic blood from my paternal grandmother’s Scottish family, Spanish blood from my maternal grandmother’s and so on. I come from a huge family with 48 first cousins and surely many more second cousins too many to count.

The basic ingredients then are as follows:

Onions

Garlic

Seasoning peppers

Sweet peppers

Tomatoes

Local celery

Parsley

Thyme (the thyme doesn’t have to be the big leaved local variety shown in the picture)

There is very little in traditional West Indian cookery that doesn’t include the majority of these ingredients and definitely the first two, onions and garlic.

Everything should be chopped and you could do this by putting it all together in the food processor.

If you were going to “season” your meat you would pour this over like a marinade and probably splash in some Worcestershire sauce and leave for a few hours or overnight.

 

If this was destined to be a sauce, then you would soften the mix and add maybe some more chopped tomatoes if you are lucky enough to have lots of fresh ones, or open a can of tinned tomatoes. Let it simmer for 15 minutes until everything is nicely softened and being friendly to each other, and pour over a waiting piece of fish or vegetables. The uses are many. Go ahead….experiment. The photo above shows this creole sauce being used to simmer fillets of Grey Snapper.