Street Icon · Curried Chickpea Sandwich

Doubles

Photo: GeoTrinity (Wikimedia Commons) / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

The dish only got its name because customers kept demanding a second piece of fried bread — the vendor's improvised fix became the country's most famous snack.

Doubles sandwich spiced curried chickpeas (channa) between two soft, fried flatbreads called bara. Vendors dress it to order with tamarind chutney, pepper sauce, cucumber, or kuchela (pickled mango) before wrapping it in paper.

Why it's made this way: It grew out of the cooking of Indian indentured laborers brought to Trinidad's sugar plantations in the 1800s; the two-bara 'double' format was a practical fix invented in the 1930s to make the messy channa easier to eat on the go.