An Embarrassment of Mangoes (17 page)

3. Pour the mixture into a greased 8-by-8-inch pan. Allow to set for a couple of minutes, then cut into squares and serve warm.

Serves 6–8

Tips

• Some versions include okra (though we prefer our coo-coo plain). If you want to include it, thinly slice 4 okras and cook in the coconut milk until soft, about 10 minutes, before adding the cornmeal.

• Slices of coo-coo are also excellent grilled. Brush them lightly with olive oil and set on the barbecue. Cook until lightly crisped on both sides.

Plantain Spiders

Sprinkled with lots of sea salt and served hot, these are positively addictive—better than French fries—and a real happy-hour treat. I’ve yet to make them for anyone who can eat just one.

Watch them carefully while they’re frying, and take them out of the oil when they’re just golden. If they cook too long, they’ll become hard.

2 large plantains, 1 green and 1 semiripe

2 tablespoons very thin slivers fresh ginger

2 tablespoons very thin slivers garlic

Salt

2 cups vegetable oil (approx.), for deep frying

Freshly ground black pepper

1. Peel the plantains and shred coarsely using the largest holes on a hand grater. (You should have about 11⁄3 cups.)

2. Combine the plantain, ginger, and garlic in a mixing bowl with a little salt and toss well to combine.

3. Heat oil to 350°F in a deep, heavy pot, wok, or deep fryer. Using 2 forks or spoons, carefully drop tablespoons of the plantain mixture into the hot oil. (Don’t compress the plantain shreds tightly—you want them to look “spidery” when they emerge from the pot.) Fry until golden on all sides, about 2 minutes total.

4. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to paper towels to drain. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve at once.

Serves 4 as a snack

Tips

• Don’t crowd the pot—fry a few spiders at a time and let the oil return to 350°F between batches.

• Plantains, which look like overgrown, sharp-edged bananas, are available in North American supermarkets located where there are communities of West Indians. Judge their ripeness by their color: Green ones are unripe, yellowy-green to yellow ones are semiripe moving to ripe, and yellowy-black ones are very ripe.

Mango Crisp

The perfect dessert when you have an embarrassment of mangoes. (And when you don’t, you can substitute berries—blueberries, raspberries, strawberries—for some of the mango.) Although not an option on
Receta
(our boat freezer wouldn’t keep ice cream), the crisp is delicious with vanilla ice cream. Alternatively, serve with lightly whipped cream, lightly sweetened sour cream or yogurt, or crème fraîche. (See Tips, below.)

For the topping

1⁄2 cup flour

3⁄4 cup quick-cooking or old-fashioned oats

2⁄3 cup packed brown sugar

1⁄4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

2 tablespoons finely chopped crystallized ginger

1⁄3 cup cold butter

For the fruit

6 cups sliced ripe mango (about 3–4 mangoes, depending on size)

11⁄2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice

1⁄4 cup packed brown sugar (approx.)

2 tablespoons flour

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter a 2-quart (8-inch-square) baking dish.

2. Prepare the topping: In a large bowl, combine flour, oats, brown sugar, nutmeg, and crystallized ginger. Cut in cold butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Set aside.

3. Toss the mango with the lime juice. Combine sugar and flour, and toss with fruit. Taste and adjust sweetness if desired. Spread fruit in the prepared dish.

4. Sprinkle topping evenly over fruit. Bake in preheated oven for about 40–50 minutes, until the fruit is bubbling and the topping is crisp and lightly browned. Serve warm.

Serves 8

Tips

• For a nutty topping, toss about 1⁄2 cup slivered almonds with the topping mixture.

• To make crème fraîche, combine 2 cups whipping cream and 1 cup sour cream in a nonmetallic bowl, cover with plastic, and let stand at room temperature for 16–24 hours or until thickened. Refrigerate until serving.

• To make your own crystallized ginger, peel ginger, slice into 1⁄4-inch-thick slices, and boil in cane syrup or sugar syrup (see page 149) for 20 minutes. Remove from syrup, drain, and roll in granulated sugar. Allow to air dry on a rack, then keep in a tightly closed jar.

That Demon Rum

One part sour,
Two parts sweet,
Three parts strong,
Four parts weak,
Five drops of bitters, and nutmeg spice,
Serve well chilled with lots of ice.

TRADITIONAL WEST INDIAN RECIPE
FOR RUM PUNCH

Mid-morning in the anchorage at Hog Island, and I hear the unmistakable sound of a visitor approaching: the buzz of a small outboard, first getting louder, then changing to a gentle
putt-putt-putt
, followed by a squeak as an inflatable dinghy bumps our hull. With this advance warning, I’m already up the companionway in my bathing suit—usual onboard attire these days—before the visitor has a chance to rap on the hull and shout hello.

It’s Treesha, off the big catamaran from California called
New Tricks
, which she shares with her husband, Tim, and Bubba, a slender, well-coiffed standard poodle.

“You’re invited to a rum tasting tonight. On
New Tricks
. Around five. Bring yourselves and a bottle of rum.” Before roaring off to spread the word to the next boat, Treesha explains that “the Minister of Rum” is behind the tasting. He’s asked
New Tricks
to host it “because our cockpit can hold more people than anybody else’s in the anchorage.”

We’ve heard tales about the self-styled Minister of Rum, and I’m curious to meet someone who’s been clever enough to make a career out of sailing and drinking. “We’ll be there,” I tell her.

By the time we arrive at
New Tricks
that evening, a line of dinghies is already strung behind each of the catamaran’s hulls and more than a dozen couples are lounging in the cockpit. We add our aged Brugal rum from Luperón to the two-dozen or so bottles already sitting on the cockpit table, presided over by a clean-cut, sober-looking man in his mid-forties with aviator-style glasses and a droopy mustache. His papaya-colored polo shirt bears a crest on the pocket: a rum cask with “Office of the Minister of Rum” embroidered beneath it. He is intently stirring a bit of amber liquid in a glass with a swizzle stick that actually
is
a stick: a twig that he’s just finished trimming with a pocketknife so the end branches into a circle of spokes. His demeanor implies the gathering is not merely an excuse for a party. Edward Hamilton, the Minister of Rum, is clearly quite serious about the business of drinking at hand.

In fact, not wanting to depend on the taste of a bunch of uneducated strangers, the Minister has brought along a dozen bottles from his own collection—which consists of about sixty different types of rum from one end of the Caribbean to the other, stored aboard his 40-foot sloop,
Tafia
, whose name is a French word for (what else?) rum. I’m already getting the feeling this is a man possessed.

“If you’ve never had anything but a rum and Coke, I feel sorry for you,” he begins as he moves the bottles around on the table like a kid arranging armies of toy soldiers. “Rum is the most varied spirit that is bottled. It ranges from pure white alcohol just out of the still to fine aged spirits that will rival the best cognac.” I can see Steve raising an eyebrow: We’ve definitely had the fresh-out-of-the-still stuff—Nimrod’s comes to mind—but neither of us has tasted a rum that would come close to rivaling
any
cognac, let alone the best.

The Minister is sorting the bottles by their place of origin, French islands on one side of the table, everywhere else on the other. Then, within each group, he clusters them by their dominant raw ingredient, “the most easily recognizable factor affecting a rum’s taste,” he explains. He then gets down to business, pouring, swirling, and sipping as he talks.

Rum is made either from fresh sugar cane juice—“this kind of rum is called
rhum agricole
and comes almost exclusively from the French islands”; from cane syrup—“which is cane juice boiled down to remove some of the water,” much the way maple syrup is made from sap; or from molasses. “In the English-speaking islands, most rum is made from molasses, which is what’s left after crystallized sugar is extracted from sugar cane juice.” (In the French islands, molasses-based rum is called “
rhum industriel
,” and the islanders export most of it to France; they drink the
rhum agricole
themselves.)

As we had learned at Nimrod’s, aging (or lack thereof) is the next big determiner of taste. “It’s a pretty nebulous term,” the Minister says. “A rum can spend as little as three months in the barrel and be called aged. And rum doesn’t get any better once it’s in the bottle.” In the French islands, to be called
rhum vieux
—old rum—a rum must spend at least three years in a barrel. But in Spanish islands such as the Dominican Republic, there is no requirement as to how old rum has to be for the distiller to put
añejo
—aged—on the bottle. As an example, Ed picks up the Brugal Añejo we brought along. It’s probably been aged just a short while, he says. Its deep rich color comes from the addition of caramel rather than from barrel time. Perhaps the 45-peso price (about $3) should have given us a clue. “Even well-aged rums almost always have their color enhanced with caramel.” Except for aged white rums, of course, which are filtered to remove any color imparted by time in the barrel.

“The question I’m most frequently asked,” the Minister says, not waiting for anyone to ask it, “is what is my favorite rum? I have a lot of favorites. I haven’t found one that I want to drink to the exclusion of others.” Later, in private, he confesses he has a “shortlist” of twenty-five favorites, and if he
really
had to, he could pare it down to maybe sixteen.

“But I want you to taste each rum for yourself and not rely on me or anyone else to tell you what you like.”

This is what the crowd’s been waiting for. But before he turns us loose on his table, the Minister offers a final tip: Be sure to have a glass of water between drinks. Otherwise, don’t expect sympathy from him for your killer headache.

We look at the labels like Ed has told us to, noting the alcohol content, the distiller, the place of origin, and any information about the age of the rum. We pour a small finger in a glass, hold it up to the light to judge the color, swirl it, sniff it deeply, analyze the smell, and then take a taste. At least that’s what we do the first couple of times. Things get a little more, uh, haphazard once people have tried four or five rums. I distinctly remember, toward the end of the evening, one of the guests interviewing the rest of us to solicit our opinions on the various bottles, using a well-gnawed corncob as his microphone.

Ed has written several books on rum, and he’s brought along copies of his most recent one, his self-published
Rums of the Eastern Caribbean
—a useful refresher in case any of the details of the tasting are a little foggy the next morning—but given the frugality that abounds in cruising circles, he doesn’t have many takers. “I’d rather spend the money on rum,” whispers one crusty old salt. But, in fact, the book is an island-by-island guide to distilleries and rum shops, stuffed with “visas” that entitle the bearer to discounts throughout the entire Caribbean. A “passport to rum,” Ed calls it, and a determined cruiser could easily recover his investment in reading material by using the visas for a free drink here, and a half-price bottle there. There’s even a visa for a free shot of rum at Nimrod’s—not a big incentive for me, I’ll tell you, but of course we buy the book to add to
Receta
’s by now overstuffed bookshelf. “Keep the wind behind you and your glass half full,” Ed writes in the front. Steve senses an epiphany.

I
t had come out in conversation at the tasting that we had worked in publishing in the “real world,” and Ed had asked if he could pick our brains. Sure enough, a few days later, he rows his wooden dinghy over to
Receta
at sunset, a couple of rum bottles tucked between his knees. Trade tastings for publishing advice? Sounds fair to us.

He immediately heads belowdecks to
Receta
’s galley, to mix us each a ’ti punch to start things off. The before-dinner drink of choice in the French West Indies, ’ti punch has the same mystique there that the martini does in North America. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, it’s said you can judge the quality of a restaurant by its ’ti punch. And, like the martini, it demands a glass all its own—a small, squat tumbler that often bears a colored decal advertising the brand of rum the drink contains. Ed is forced to make do with our standard acrylic boat glasses. He has brought us a proper swizzle stick, though: one of his trimmed twigs with its propeller-like end for stirring.

’Ti is a contraction of the French
petit
, he tells us, which refers to the size of the drink—just a couple of ounces over maybe one ice cube—
not
to the size of the punch it packs, which is decidedly
grand
. It’s a deceptively simple combination of
rhum agricole
, freshly squeezed lime juice, and pure cane syrup; the trick is getting the proportions right, when “right” is a matter of personal taste. One ’ti punch can taste dramatically different from another, depending on the balance of sour, sweet, and strong, and, most importantly, the brand of strong you use.

A couple of sips and Steve has declared a mission: As soon as we get to Martinique—the first French island on our way up the island chain—
Receta
will acquire a set of proper ’ti punch glasses, and the
rhum agricole
and cane syrup to go with them. He can’t wait to start experimenting.

We talk more about rum than publishing, but that seems fine with Ed: This is a man who
loves
to talk about what he does for a living and how he does it—a rarity among cruisers who are escaping the “W word”—and, besides, it gives him a reason to row back again the next night, with a different selection of bottles tucked between his knees.

Ed admits he started the Ministry of Rum and appointed himself minister as an excuse to keep sailing the Caribbean and visiting distilleries—but he also wanted to raise awareness, he says, of what he felt was an underappreciated form of alcohol. Sure, sure.

“When I started traveling around learning about rum, people started giving me rum. The more I learned, the more rum they gave me. And the better the rums were.” During his ten trips up and down the island chain, he’s been shown private stills, sampled rums that are older than he is, and been served special home brews in off-the-beaten-path rum shops.

“There is no substitute,” he tells us, unequivocally, “for seeing how the rum is made. Going to the distilleries and meeting the people who make the spirits will enhance your enjoyment of their efforts.”

We take his words to heart and start to use his book as he really intended: as a travel guide to the world of Caribbean rum.

T
he narrow dirt road is shaded by stately old mahoganies and “deh tourist tree,” as islanders call the gumbo limbo, the tree with the red-orange peeling bark. The dust we kick up as we walk is sticking nicely to my sweaty legs. We had started out from
Receta
in the relative cool of early morning, but that was three tightly packed buses and more than two hours ago, and I’m now feeling anything but fresh. When we changed buses for the last time in the town of Grenville on the other side of the island, halfway up the coast, we had asked the driver to let us off at Dunfermline Estate.

“All the bus drivers know where to stop,” Ed had assured us. “When you get off, take the left fork of the dirt road to the distillery.” That we’ve done, but there are no signs, no buildings, and no people in sight. “I don’t know about this,” I say to Steve.

“Yeah, but just take a whiff,” says he of the sensitive nose. “This is right.”

A few moments later I pick it up, and the air soon becomes heavy with the scent of rum being made: a smell that’s part burned sugar—from the pots of boiling cane juice and the burning sugar-cane stalks used to feed the boilers—and part sweet fermenting syrup.

Eventually the laneway opens up to reveal a collection of old stone and wood buildings with sugar cane, bananas, and cocoa growing on the cultivated hillsides behind them. Clearly, Dunfermline Estate doesn’t get many tourists. There’s nothing quite so obvious as a visitor center, store, or even an office, and as we debate which building to head for, a bone-skinny man in ragged pants and T-shirt heads toward us. Both his long hair and his even longer beard are styled in dreadlocks, and when he speaks, it’s a strong mumbled patois. Not your typical tour guide. “Good day,” says Steve. “Is it possible to see the distillery?” We don’t understand a word of his response, but his body language indicates he’s agreed to show us around.

For the next half-hour we follow him from one building to the next, and listen to him “explain” what we are seeing. Dunfermline is the third distillery we’ve visited, and by now we, as Ed puts it, “speak a little rum.” Fortunately. Braided Beard points to something, mumbles incomprehensibly, and we respond as if we’ve understood perfectly. Yes, of course, the piles of
bagasse
, the sugar-cane stalks from which the juice has been pressed. Yes, the water-powered cane mill that does the pressing job and delivers the fresh juice to the stone boiling house, where the fires are fed by the
bagasse
from the first step of the process. Yes, I nod knowingly, the fermentation vats, where the “wash”—the cane juice mixed with water and yeast—sits until the distiller determines it’s ready for the still. At Dunfermline, where the rum is fairly heavy-bodied, that’s ten to twelve days, though light rums are fermented for as little as twenty-four hours. We even manage to ask appropriate questions (at least we think they are) at what we think is the appropriate time.

The highlight of the tour comes when Braided Beard swings open the door to the still house, to show us the yellowed sight glass used for determining the alcohol content of the raw rum. The simplest still—the type beloved by backyard bootleggers—is the pot still, which consists (in simplest form) of a kettle heated over a wood fire and attached to a condenser. It makes alcohol in batches, a kettle at a time, and is labor intensive. To increase production, most distilleries use a variation on the continuous distillation column, which is fed by a continuous stream of fermented wash, heated by steam. Not Dunfermline. It uses a copper pot still, as it always has. The doorway of the still house is low, the interior dim. I duck and follow our guide into the darkness.
Whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup
. An extended family of fruit bats brushes past me into the light as I stifle a scream.