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When a piece of well-seasoned chicken meets a hot, oiled cast-iron pot, the moment is not simply acoustic. The sharp hiss, the burst of steam, the faint crackle of fat are all portals.
For Dr. Marissa Toussaint, the aroma that follows serves as a form of sensory transport. It is, she says, the smell of Sundays in Trinidad: waking to find her mother “frazzled from being up all night,” preparing the family’s requisite lavish lunch. She gives it a name, “stew chicken memory”, and locates in it a diagnosis: every patient, she insists, carries their own version of this memory, an emotional tether to food that Western medicine, in its prescriptive zeal, has too often ignored.
In her quietly insurgent new book, Flambeau Kitchen, Dr. Toussaint stakes a claim: that culinary heritage and long-term wellness need not stand in opposition. Trained as a physician in obesity and culinary medicine, she poses a gentle corrective to decades of nutritional dogma. For communities of color, and particularly those of Caribbean heritage, her proposal feels radical: that one need not choose between the flavors of home and the discipline of health.
Her own story is bicontinental in cast and rich in cultural tension. Born in Washington, D.C., to Trinbagonian parents who met in college, she then moved back to Trinidad and Tobago for much of her childhood. Later she returned to the U.S. for high school, college and medical school, and now practices in Brooklyn after a residency in Manhattan. Two decades of observing patients, she says, have revealed a crucial flaw, not in the appetites of the people she treats, but in how her profession communicates with them.
The problem, she explains, is not food per se; it is the messaging. When confronted with hypertension or type 2 diabetes, the default clinical response is a lecture: “Don’t do this; don’t eat that; this is bad for you.” She says, “There’s something wrong, because we are missing that piece that validates the person.” What fills the resulting void is often stigma and shame, leading patients to believe that to embrace health, they must relinquish or banish their cultural identity.
Flambeau Kitchen is her proposed remedy. The title itself brims with significance. “Flambeau,” she explains, is the French Creole word for “torch” or “flame”, a linguistic artifact of France’s unofficial occupation of Trinidad. It is a word freighted with history: with the island’s colonial past, with Carnival’s bonfires, with her own surname. She wields it as metaphor: illuminating a pathway not away from heritage, but back toward it.
Dr. Toussaint is emphatic that she does not discard medical science On the contrary, she has reverse-engineered the principles of the highly researched, impressively effective Mediterranean diet and adapted them for a Caribbean palate. The result: a framework she calls the “Three S’s”: Select, Savor, and Scale. The first: Choose more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats. The second: Savor the most decadent and emotionally resonant foods on occasion. The third: Scale down portion sizes of foods that “may not be as healthy for us.” The point is not punitive; it is practical.
This is how one keeps the stew chicken. “Is it something that you want to celebrate as is in its traditional form and you’re okay with eating it on occasion?” she asks in a typical patient consultation. If yes, wonderful. If the answer leans toward “I want this more frequently,” then the conversation shifts: “Can we add more vegetables to that rich broth? Can we switch the type of oil or reduce it?” It is a conversation rooted in cultural humility, one that honors the memory locked inside the meal.
When asked for her own favorite recipe from the book, she names Callaloo, a foundational dish of dasheen (or taro) leaves. She loves it both for “its emotional significance” and because it is, she says, “rich and also healthful… a meal unto itself.”
The balance of ideal and real extends into her own life. What, one wonders, is in the lunchbox of a culinary medicine expert? “So today I have a salad,” she admits, but she quickly pivots: “I’m very much my mother’s child,” she says, prone to pre-ordering during a busy workweek. The real work, she says, happens on the weekend. Like her mother, she cooks in large batches, often cultural foods from the book, like Pumpkin Talkari, then balances them with salads and beans through the week.
Ultimately, she hopes that Flambeau Kitchen will serve two audiences: her clinical colleagues, who she wants to regard this as a resource; and the broader public, who she invites to understand that Caribbean food is not a monolith. But her primary hope is for her community. She wants readers to approach the book with “an open mind of curiosity” and to come away with two things that modern health advice rarely provides: “a sense of cultural pride” and the empowerment to make a change.
In the hiss of that cast-iron pot, in the swirl of aroma and memory, Dr. Marissa Toussaint invites us all to reconsider what sits on the plate, and what sits within us.