When Lauren took a trip to Barbados, she downloaded Tinder as a way to meet locals in the country. She didn’t expect to find her future husband.

She immediately connected with Christopher. On the last day of Lauren’s trip, Christopher brought her fish cakes to snack on her ride to the airport.

“It was kind of like Chris gave me a piece of his own culture,” Lauren remembers.

Their relationship survived years of long distance as they traveled back-and-forth to visit each other, until Christopher finally moved to Lauren’s hometown of Vancouver, Canada. The recipe for fish cakes came with him.

Years later, the couple is now married with two children. Their love of fish cakes has passed on to their youngest son, Mars.

“He loves fish cakes, so I said he’s like our fish cake baby because he came from the fish cakes,” Lauren joked.

Bajan fish cakes are similar to other forms of codfish fritters, such as Portugal’s pastéis de bacalhau, made of salted cod, potatoes, onion, and herbs, which are then battered and fried.

Barbadian cuisine is a mixture of all the cultures and communities that touched the island, from the original Indigenous populations, to the Portuguese settlers, to the enslaved Africans who were brought to work on plantations.

While cod fish cakes may have originally been inspired by Portugal’s pastéis de bacalhau, these have their own Bajan twist, using a unique blend of herbs and spices, and are often accompanied with a Bajan pepper sauce.