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Guyanese Foodways

National

⚠ THE ONLY SOUTH AMERICAN COUNTRY WHOSE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IS ENGLISH, and culturally Caribbean rather than South American. Its food is the clearest statement of what the country is: PEPPERPOT, an Indigenous dish preserved with cassareep, eaten at Christmas by everyone; COOK-UP RICE, the Afro-Guyanese one-pot; ROTI and DHAL PURI and CURRY from indenture; CHOW MEIN and fried rice from Chinese migration, now Guyanese; GARLIC PORK from the Madeirans; and the bakery of black cake, pine tart, salara and cheese roll. ⚠ SEVEN CURRY eaten off a LOTUS LEAF with the fingers; ⚠ METEMGEE and CASSAVA BREAD; ⚠ and an enormous rice and sugar agriculture on land below sea level. Ten administrative regions; the coast holds almost everyone.

Atlas — where and when

Where in the world

Communities and languages

  • Guyanese community documented

Languages: English, Guyanese Creole English, Caribbean Hindustani

What is recorded

  • Guyana is the only South American state with English as its official language. Its foodways are recorded as a plural system in which Indo-Guyanese, Afro-Guyanese, Indigenous, Chinese and Portuguese-Madeiran traditions are each first-class rather than variations on a majority cuisine. Approximately 90 per cent of the population lives on the coastal plain, much of it reclaimed land below sea level behind sea defences. documented

Related foodways

This foodway relates to

  • related to Brazilian Cuisine documented

    The Rupununi and the Takutu crossing to Roraima, with shared Makushi and Wapishana communities and a cattle economy.

  • related to British Caribbean Food Culture documented

    Guyana is anglophone, was British Guiana, and its bakery, its curries and its Christmas are Caribbean-British.

  • related to Surinamese Foodways documented

    Neighbours, both plural indentured-and-enslaved societies, both with Indian and Chinese populations, both with the same Indigenous peoples across the border, and a shared Corentyne frontier.

  • related to Venezuelan Cuisine documented

    A long border, shared Warao, Kari’ña, Akawaio and Pemón peoples, and substantial Guyanese migration into Venezuela.

Recorded as relating to this foodway

  • related to Trinidad and Tobago Foodways documented

    The two largest Indo-Caribbean populations, the same indenture route and the same decades. Separate national cuisines.

Regional cuisines

Recipes

No recipes are filed under this cuisine yet.