An Embarrassment of Mangoes (19 page)

At the processing station, the nutmegs go to cracking machines once they’re dry, and workers then separate the kernels from the shells by hand. The kernels are dumped into water tanks to separate the floaters, which have a high oil content and are sold for processing, from the sinkers, which have less oil and are sold as spice. Some of the floaters are destined for the nutmeg oil refinery at the north end of the island. Commercially, the oil is used as a flavoring and in soaps and moisturizers; but locally, some of the nutmeg oil will be sold as a “condiment” to relieve rheumatism, arthritis, backaches, joint pain, and the congestion of coughs and colds.

More than six weeks later, I crack one of my nutmegs open with pliers and grate the seed onto our rum punch with a stainless-steel rasp. The warm woody flavor calls up a day in the mountains, sunlight filtering through thick green foliage, falling water, oversized leaves, outrageously painted flowers. And mud.

Steve’s ’Ti Punch

Much experimentation was required before Steve achieved what he thinks is the perfect balance of strong, sour, and sweet. Judge for yourself.

11⁄2 ounces
rhum agricole
(see Tips, below)

1⁄4 ounce pure cane syrup (see Tips, below)

1⁄4 ounce freshly squeezed lime juice

Combine the ingredients in a measuring cup. Stir with a swizzle stick and serve over 1 ice cube in a small glass.

Makes 1 drink

Tips

• To be perfectly authentic, a ’ti punch should be made with clear
rhum agricole
, which gives the drink a distinctive taste. However, in a pinch you can substitute any white rum.

• Cane syrup can be found throughout the West Indies, as well as in parts of the southern U.S. It too has a distinctive taste—imagine a light golden, slightly smoky molasses—but simple sugar syrup is an easily made substitute: Combine equal parts (by volume) of sugar and water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar goes into solution. Cool and store in the fridge.

Steve’s Favorite Plantains

(a.k.a. Fried Plantains with Nutmeg and Rum)

Fried ripe plantains sprinkled with just salt and pepper are a common Caribbean side dish. One day I added a squeeze of lime, a splash of rum, and some freshly grated nutmeg—and from then on, I never made them any other way.

I like serving these plantains with grilled chicken or chicken curry. But in Steve’s eyes, they go with just about anything. He was also particularly fond of the version I made with my homemade spiced rum.

For this dish, you want really ripe (but not mushy) plantains. Plan on half a plantain per person—unless that person is Steve, in which case, a full plantain per person is barely adequate.

Ripe plantains

Vegetable oil, or a combination of oil and butter, for shallow frying

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Freshly grated nutmeg

Fresh lime

Rum

1. Cut the plantains in half crosswise and peel. (See Tips, below.) Slice each half lengthwise into 1⁄4-inch-thick slices.

2. Heat a few tablespoons of oil or a combination of oil and butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. Sauté the plantain slices until golden on both sides, about 4 minutes per side, sprinkling each side with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

3. When the plantains are almost done, squeeze a little lime juice over top and add a splash of plain or spiced rum. Serve hot.

Tips

• Plantains are more difficult to peel than bananas. To do it most easily, trim the top and bottom off each plantain and cut the plantain crosswise in half. Then peel off the skin by hand.

• To make your own spiced rum, have a drink out of a bottle of light or white rum to make room for the spices. (Light rums will take on the flavor of the spices better than dark rums, which often have a more pronounced flavor to start with.) Add a cinnamon stick, a whole nutmeg out of its shell, a few cloves, and perhaps one or two slices of ginger. (I have also stuffed in pieces of whole mace—but don’t use the ground stuff, which is the type you usually find in North American stores.) Although some patient types allow their spiced rum to steep for months, you only need to let a few weeks go by before trying it.

Mr. Butters,
the Mysterious
Breadfruit, and
Monday Night Mas

No doubt our productivity would have been affected. . . . Probably, this week may have seen a great number of people taking the remaining work days to recover after consuming too much alcohol, or being fatigued from the constant long sleepless hours over the days of festivity.

EDITORIAL ENTITLED “NOW THE CARNIVAL OVER,”
GRENADA
INFORMER: THE FEARLESS WEEKLY THAT TELLS IT AS IT IS
,
WEEK ENDING FRIDAY, AUGUST 14, 1998

The beach on the mainland side of the Hog Island anchorage—a tiny patch of sand by two derelict, half-submerged Cuban gunboats, relics from the 1983 invasion—is diagonally across from the Hog Island beach and a minuscule fraction of its size. If you squint away the rusted hulks as you approach, the scene is what winter-weary tourists dream they’ll get when they book their Caribbean holiday: a little beach all their own with soft white sand, swaying palm trees, and brochure-blue water under a flawless sky.

We’d seen cruisers dinghying into shore there only to return an hour later with arms full of watermelon and bags protruding with eggplant and squash. To us, the new kids on the block, it was a mystery, there being no sign whatsoever of habitation near that beach; certainly no market or store. But soon, through the cruisers’ grapevine, we learn of Mr. Butters.

“Pull up your dinghy on the sand and follow the path from there,” Terry and Nancy tell me. We had got to know them in George Town, and their sailboat,
La Esmeralda
, had arrived at Hog Island about a week before
Receta
. “The path will lead you right to his shack.”

Mr. Butters used to make rounds of the anchorages on this stretch of Grenada’s coast by boat, they had been told, selling his fruit and vegetables. But no more: Now, if you want to buy his produce, you have to go to him. Mr. Butters (as everyone respectfully calls him) has been squatting on the hillside behind the beach for the last seventeen years and cultivating the soil—by hand, without benefit of tractor, rototiller, or harvester.

“Did they say turn right or left?” Steve says as we drag
Snack
up onto the beach. Expecting it to be obvious, I hadn’t bothered to ask. Once we leave the sand, we’re at the edge of an expanse of more-or-less cultivated fields, hidden from the anchorage by a stand of white cedars and Indian almond trees and stretching a hundred yards in each direction. What’s lacking is a sign that says “Produce stand this way.” Cows moo unseen somewhere on the hillside in front of us. “Rare steak,” says Steve longingly. (He’s learned the hard way that the words “chewable” and “steak” don’t go together here.) We wander right; nothing. We wander left; nothing. We wander right again, by this time wishing we’d brought a water bottle, and finally spot an overgrown, sort-of track snaking through spiky sugar cane.

Five minutes along, a donkey tied to a tree flips his lips at us with disinterest. Beyond him stands a rickety wooden shack. Out front, an elderly man studiously washes eggplants in a bucket of water that’s so muddy it’s hard to imagine the vegetables aren’t emerging dirtier than they go in. “Mr. Butters?” He gestures with an eggplant a little farther up the hillside, where a younger, wiry man in torn, mud-caked trousers is bent over a bed of lettuce plants.

“Mr. Butters?” I’d been picturing a table with a tidy assortment of carefully arranged vegetables like those the market ladies have in St. George’s. But “tidy” is the last word that comes to mind here. Although stuff grows
everywhere
, it’s difficult to tell what are vegetable plants and what is just vegetation. Partly hidden by all that greenery, discarded sacks, bottles, pieces of wood, and old tires dot the landscape around two more shacks. Aside from the heap of muddy eggplants and a pile of dirt-splotched watermelons, there doesn’t appear to be anything that might be for sale, and I don’t know quite how to initiate business. I decide to take the direct route: “Good morning, we’d like to buy some tomatoes.” With a reticent, eye-averted “good morning,” Mr. Butters gestures for me to follow him into the fields.

I get my tomatoes right off the vines, warm from the sun, along with a thick-skinned cantaloupe, a soccer ball–sized watermelon, and a beautiful bunch of escarole fresh out of the ground, dirt still clinging to its roots. Perhaps in his mid-forties, with a carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and a baseball cap jammed on his head, Mr. Butters is taciturn as we move from row to row and he loads up my arms and my canvas bag (now definitely destined for the laundry bucket). Meanwhile, I try to keep up a steady patter, complimenting him on his stuff—you can
smell
the sweetness of the cantaloupe—and exclaiming at the eye-popping view. (From the top of Mr. Butters’s hillside, the entire Hog Island anchorage is visible, right out to where the waves break over the reefs.) He’s uncommunicative, but not unfriendly, and when I
oooh
over the aroma from a little patch of purple-leaf basil by the shack, he picks a handful for me to take along, gratis.

He becomes garrulous—it’s all relative, of course—only when Steve points to the homemade signs hanging inside one of the sturdier-looking sheds. Like the others, it only has three walls, but one of them is cinder block and the roof is corrugated tin. The signs are pretty much the focus of the interior; the furnishings consist of a crude bench and a couple of rough boards banged into the walls as shelves, which hold a yellow cooler and a pile of smashed cardboard boxes.

Slogans are hand-printed on the cardboard signs: “Land is the basis of our independence. Preserve it.” “Sugar cane industry abandoned for golf course and casino.” “The Mt. Hartman deal. Under the table.” This one is illustrated with a stick-figure drawing of a Grenadian sitting across from Uncle Sam, who wheedles in a speech bubble: “Forget agriculture. We will give you dollars.” And, yes, both have their hands under the table.

“See deh bulldozer?” Mr. Butters points at a piece of machinery overgrown with foliage on the adjacent hillside. “Dey’ve sold my land for a golf course.”

We’ve heard the rumor floating among boats in the anchorage: The government has sold the strip of mainland on this side of the anchorage and all of Hog Island on the other to the Ritz-Carlton chain, which plans to link them with a bridge and put in a luxury hotel and golf course. Mr. Butters and his farm are a casualty of the deal, and he’s being forced to leave.

Like the other cruisers, we’re horrified that this little piece of undeveloped paradise may disappear—especially since the rumors also suggest that freeloading cruising boats will no longer be welcome in the bay. But communal self-interest aside, this really is a pristine piece of Grenada; to turf off the Grenadians and turn it into just another foreign-owned hotel and golf course with questionable benefit to the local economy would be a sad ending. Still, without any physical activity onshore indicating the start of a development, and with Grenada’s existing resorts not running at even close to capacity, the story had lacked believability on the cruisers’ grapevine. But here is Mr. Butters saying he expects to be booted off his land any day now—which is why he cut back on how much he planted this season, and why there’s not much for sale. “Dey offered me other land, but it’s no good for growin’ tings, not like dis.”

He’s had some press for this outrage and even found himself on TV: He may not own this piece of hillside, but he’s cleared it, improved it, and worked it for seventeen years and, around here, that makes it as good as his. His indignation, though, has mostly faded to resignation by now. When we say good-bye to trudge back to the dinghy, I’m doubtful he’ll be here the next time we come—even though the bulldozer is overgrown with foliage.

That night, I sauté a couple of cloves of garlic in olive oil, add Mr. Butters’s escarole and some thin slices of smoked sausage, toss it all with penne, and grate some good Parmesan on top. (I’ve managed to keep a hunk of Reggiano in the fridge since Florida, always finding a place to buy more—at great expense—before there’s nothing but rind left. It’s one of the few back-home ingredients I can’t bear to give up.) I chop the basil and sprinkle it on thick slices of the sun-ripened tomatoes, and christen the dinner Pasta and Salad from Mr. Butters’s Garden. I sure hope he’s there for more.

T
he path is ridiculously easy to find, of course, on our second trip, and Mr. Butters is still there, as laconic as last time. Which makes him positively chatty compared to his wife, who is cooking in one of the shacks today, deftly turning sizzling slices of eggplant in big blackened frying pans over a wood fire. She seems quite shy and, despite my practice with Dingis and Gennel, I’m not yet skilled enough in Grenadian English to understand the few words she offers up. When I lean in to ask her what she’s making, a shimmering wall of heat almost knocks me over. No wonder she’s not talking.

“Any news about the development?” Steve asks Mr. Butters.

“I have to leave, maybe tomorrow,” he says morosely.

When you shop at Mr. Butters’s, taking along a shopping list or planning to buy ingredients for a particular dish is a waste of time. After the delicious pasta, I’m looking forward to getting another big bunch of escarole. No luck. No escarole. The trick, then, is finding out what Mr. Butters
does
have, because he never
volunteers
the information. Instead, you play twenty questions, which is particularly difficult since we don’t really know what-all he grows. “Do you have any eggplants today?” “Are there ripe tomatoes?” “Is there lettuce?” “How about mangoes?” Eventually, after he says “no” to three or four items, the rules of the game permit me to ask if he has
anything
else that’s ready—at which point he might allow that, yes, there are cantaloupes or, yes, he has some squash.

One day, when I’ve reached the end of my questions almost empty-handed, he reveals that he has beets. After all that, he comes up with the one vegetable Steve won’t go near. I explain, but he insists I take a couple along anyway, without charge, for me. Another visit, he offers up what he calls a “marsh melon.” Its rind is exactly like a watermelon’s, but it’s perfectly round and when we cut it open back on the boat, the flesh is a dazzling lemon yellow. It’s absolutely gorgeous . . . and tastes just like watermelon. Steve and I can entirely demolish one of Mr. Butters’s watermelons, I’m embarrassed to admit, in a single afternoon. Whatever the color.

U
nfortunately, one thing Mr. Butters never offers is breadfruit. We’ve been tantalized by them for weeks, as the bus whips by the pendulous trees on its way into St. George’s. As we rocket around every curve, the pebbly skinned, cantaloupe-sized green globes hang almost within reach. Just try to buy one.

Even though the trees are laden with them, there are none visible in the market. And there are none up the hill at the Marketing & National Import Board, the set-price (no bargaining allowed), government-owned business that sells “food crops” purchased from local farmers. None for sale on the streets. I decide to ask the market lady who’s been helping me learn my mangoes. “All gone,” she says. “Come in the morning.” It’s barely midday at this point.

Next trip, I try again. It’s about 9
A
.
M
. “All gone,” she says. “Come in the
early
morning.” The odds of us getting from
Receta
to the market much earlier are kind of slim, no matter how badly I want to make my own breadfruit salad. Meanwhile, they continue to taunt us from every tree.

Breadfruit plants first came to the West Indies from the South Pacific in the late 1700s, carried by the infamous Captain William Bligh, the idea being that the fruit from these prolific trees would be used by the British to feed slaves cheaply on the sugar plantations. One story suggests that breadfruit was in fact responsible for the mutiny on the
Bounty
: When Bligh left Tahiti in 1789, he took more than 1,000 breadfruit plants on the ship with him. There was a water shortage on board, and after discovering the captain was using a secret supply of water on his precious breadfruit plants, the crew mutinied. In any event, Bligh and a second batch of plants reached St. Vincent after the mutiny, on another vessel, the
Providence
, in 1793. (A descendant of one of Bligh’s breadfruit trees still grows in the St. Vincent Botanic Gardens.) The British, however, were thwarted in their cheap-food scheme: The slaves refused to eat the foreign food, and it only achieved acceptance in the Caribbean years after emancipation.

Beneath the breadfruit’s tough, lime-green skin is a firm, white, starchy flesh, slightly porous and fibrous at the fruit’s very center. When boiled or roasted—it can’t be eaten raw—it’s reminiscent of soft, doughy, freshly baked white bread; hence, the name. After this initial cooking, it can be fried, stuffed, mashed, creamed, scalloped, turned into a salad, or eaten plain with butter. In fact, this filling, carbohydrate-laden fruit serves much the same culinary function here as white potatoes (called “Irish potatoes” in Grenada) do elsewhere.

Our persistence in the name of homemade breadfruit salad finally pays off: In the supermarket at nearby Grand Anse, a store not generally noted for a stellar selection of produce, I spot a bin of bright-green cannonballs one day. The problem is, every one of them is cannonball hard. Hefting one of the smallest (which means it’s still pretty large—a breadfruit can weigh up to ten pounds), I home in on a middle-aged shopper and ask her if it’s ripe. She shakes her head with some amusement. “When a breadfruit is ripe, it’s garbage. You want it while it’s green. And you don’t want one that’s soft.” She hands me back my completely solid offering and says it’s ready to cook that day. After they’re picked breadfruit apparently turn in short order to a smelly, unpleasant, mayonnaise-like mush inside, which is why there are so many still on the trees and so few brought each day to market. Dingis later tells me that the
surest
way to choose a good one is to have the market lady cut it open for you, so you can inspect the solidity of the inside before you buy.