Celebrate The Holidays Virgin Islands Style with These Chef Recipes

Chef Winston Williams’s enthusiasm for all things culinary is contagious. Originally from the U.S. Virgin Islands, he brings his “Floribbean” style to high-end events across South Florida, from food festivals to glamorous weddings and parties.

Owner of the popular full-service catering company, Catering CC, he keeps a jam-packed work schedule, but still manages to entertain and inform over-six thousand subscribers on his YouTube channel.

For Chef Winston, the holiday season is all about the sweetness of family gatherings, of which tasty food and beverages were always a part. As a kid, he especially looked forward to lattice-topped fruit tarts—pineapple, guava, and coconut, to name a few—and homemade mauby drink every year. “Grandma and Mom would bake tarts,” he remembers, “and you could smell them throughout the house,” while the mauby fermented in the corner.

VIRGIN ISLANDS COCONUT TART
Crust

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon table salt
8 ounces cold unsalted butter
1 whole egg

Preheat the oven to 425 F. Combine flour and salt in a large bowl. Cut in butter using a knife and fork or pastry cutter. Add egg. Stir together until ingredients form a soft dough. Wrap dough in plastic wrap, flatten and let rest in the refrigerator for one hour. Unwrap from the plastic. Roll out to 1/8-inch thickness. Place half the dough into the tart pan. Save the rest of the dough for decorating the top of the tart. Bake crust for 5 minutes in oven. Set aside.

Coconut Filling


2 cups grated coconut
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

Combine coconut, sugar and water in a saucepan. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 40 to 45 minutes, until mixture turns from milky white to clear. Add essence. Spoon filling into crust. Cut remaining crust in 3/4 inch strips and crisscross them on top of filling, lattice-style. Bake at 375 F for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the crust is a toasty brown.

MAUBY

1 ounce sweet marjoram
1 ounce rosemary
4 (3-inch) mauby bark
1 orange (fresh orange peel)
3 pounds sugar
1 ounce anise
1 cinnamon stick
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 tablespoon cake yeast
1gallon water

Boil bark and herbs in one quart of water to make bitters. Fill another container with
the gallon of water and sweeten with sugar. Add the bitters, then toss mixture with a
ladle. When the mixture begins to foam, add the yeast. Strain through a cheesecloth and bottle. Let stand overnight.

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