Certain foods are too powerful to stay in the past. Buljol, named for the contorted patois of the French words brulé (burned) and gueule (mouth), is a dish of dried salted cod, and has followed my family through generations, well beyond my mother’s childhood in 1950s Trinidad. Every Friday night, my maternal grandmother, Elaine Cadet, whom everyone called Teacher, would make a sauté using the flaked meat of boiled salted cod (or saltfish, as it’s most commonly called in the Caribbean).

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