A bokit is a Guadeloupean sandwich made in fried bread. The dough is rolled flat, dropped into hot oil until it puffs and blisters, split open while it is still too hot to hold, and stuffed — salt cod, chicken, ham and cheese, whatever the van has. You eat it standing up, usually by a road, usually with sauce running down your wrist.
It is the food young Guadeloupeans abroad miss most. I have been in Britain twenty-eight years and I still cannot buy one here. So let me at least explain it.
What it actually is
The bread is the point. It is a simple dough — flour, water, salt, a little yeast or baking powder depending on who taught you — rolled into a round and fried rather than baked. In the oil it swells, the outside goes crisp and golden, the inside stays soft and slightly chewy. Think of the outside of a good doughnut and the inside of a flatbread, and you are close.
Then it is split and filled. The classic fillings are:
- Morue — salt cod, flaked and dressed, the original and still the best
- Poulet — chicken, usually spiced and shredded
- Jambon-fromage — ham and cheese, the French influence showing
- Complet — "the works", which means whatever the van is proudest of that day
On top of the filling goes salad, and then sauce. Always sauce. Sauce chien if you want the sharp herb-and-lime version, or a hot sauce if you want the burn. Most people want both.
Where it comes from
Bokit is poor people's food that became everybody's food, which is the story of most things worth eating.
After the abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1848, formerly enslaved people needed food that was cheap, filling and quick. Fried dough answered all three. The bread could be made from the flour that was available, cooked in a single pan of oil, and eaten with whatever was to hand.
The name is the part nobody can prove. The most common account links it to the journey cake of the English-speaking islands — a travelling bread that became johnny cake in the mouths of people who spoke it, and something like bokit in the mouths of people who spoke Creole. It is a good story. It may even be true. What is certain is that the bread has been fried in Guadeloupe for well over a century, and that it belongs to us now regardless of where the word started.
Where to find one
Roadside vans, mostly. The bokit van is a Guadeloupean institution in the way the chip van is a British one. You find them at beaches, outside markets, along the road out of Pointe-à-Pitre, and on Sainte-Anne beach in the south of Grande-Terre, where a bokit and a cold beer at the end of an afternoon is close to a religious observance.
There are sit-down places that do them too, and some are excellent. But a bokit eaten indoors with a knife and fork has lost something it does not get back.
Why Britain never got it
The same reason Britain never got colombo or accras: the Guadeloupeans who left went to France. Britain's Caribbean food is Jamaican and Trinidadian because those are the people who came here, and they brought jerk and doubles and patties. Nobody brought the bokit van.
Which means that somewhere in Britain there is a market stall or a food truck that could be the first. I am not going to pretend that is not a thought I have had.
Making one at home
It is a proper project — fried dough, a filling, a sauce — and I will write the method up properly rather than rush it. In the meantime, the two parts you can make today are the things that go in it: the salt cod, prepared the Guadeloupe way, and a spicy mayonnaise that does the job of the sauce.
Then find some flour and some oil, and we will get to the bread.
