An Embarrassment of Mangoes (35 page)

Shortly afterward, friends arrive at their boats and island houses, and a spontaneous party happens. But for us it’s bittersweet. I know the last two years have to end, but I can’t bear the thought. I don’t want just to sink complacently back into our old existence. I’ve seen too clearly there’s more to life than that.

When we climb back onboard late that night, almost hoarse from telling stories (Cleo would have been proud), my loyal stuffed pal Curious George is sulking. I reassure him—and myself—that we will indeed go to sea again.

Sleep comes with great difficulty. Instead of sheep, I count goats—the ones that graze on the hillsides of southern Grenada.

I
n a downtown Toronto business-district building about a week after our return, Steve steps onto an elevator. “Good afternoon,” he says, looking the other passengers in the eye and smiling broadly. They shuffle nervously to clear a wide space for him and avert their eyes. In a downtown Toronto market, I stop to buy fish. Fresh tuna is $18.99 a pound, and I catch tears running down my face. It’s not the price, but what the sight of that tuna represents: Two years overflowing with an embarrassment of riches.

We make a trip to the storage locker where we had left our possessions when we moved onboard. Furniture. Clothing. Appliances. Tchotchkes. When Steve throws open the big steel door, we stand and look at each other, mystified. All that
stuff
. We forgot we had it. We don’t want to take it back.

As we unpack
Receta
, preparing to move back into our house, I find two whole canned chickens at the very back of one of the food lockers. They have traveled 5,500 nautical miles, at least. And I never thought once of opening them.

Low-Country Boil

(a.k.a. Frogmore Stew)

A fab, fun way to serve a crowd. The only thing you need to accompany the stew is lots of melted butter—and lots of paper towels. This isn’t genteel dining.

2 12-ounce bottles of beer

Kielbasa or sausage (1⁄4 pound per person), cut into chunks

Large container of Old Bay Seasoning

Chicken thighs or legs (1 pound per person)

Small new potatoes (3–4 per person)

Corn on the cob (1 ear per person), cut in thirds

Shrimp (1⁄4 pound per person; more if not including clams and crabs)

Clams (8 per person)

Crabs (1 per person)

1. Pour enough beer and water in a big steamer pot (see Tip, below) to reach the bottom of the steamer basket, and bring to a boil.

2. Put the kielbasa or sausage in the steamer basket and sprinkle liberally with Old Bay Seasoning. Cook 3–5 minutes.

3. Add chicken, potatoes, and more Old Bay. Cook 12–15 minutes.

4. Add corn and Old Bay. Cook 10 minutes.

5. Add shrimp and Old Bay. Cook 2 minutes.

6. Add clams and crabs and Old Bay. Serve when clams open and crabs are cooked, about 5 minutes more.

7. Dump the whole steamer basket out on a table covered with newspaper. Let the crowd dig in.

Tip

• Proper Frogmore Stew–making equipment consists of a stand-alone propane-fired burner on which sits a massive pot equipped with a steamer basket. These are available at hardware stores throughout the South.

King Mackerel Escabeche

Escabeche, or escovitch, is pickled or “soused” fish. Most recipes call for a white-fleshed fish such as snapper, but king mackerel (kingfish) or Spanish mackerel also works well—especially when you’ve just caught one of each and each one measures 3 feet. The technique involves first frying and then marinating the fish, a marriage of two culinary traditions: African (frying the fish) and Native American (preserving or pickling the fish in vinegar or lime juice, as with ceviche).

Islanders serve escabeche both chilled and hot, as an appetizer and as a main course. Because it can be made in advance and kept in the fridge, it’s a lovely dish for a warm-weather dinner party or buffet.

4 tablespoons olive oil (approx.)

1 large white or yellow onion, thinly sliced

1 red onion, thinly sliced

2 green bell peppers, thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1⁄2–1 teaspoon hot pepper, seeded and finely chopped (or to taste)

2 pounds fish fillets or steaks

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 bay leaves

1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped

6 whole black peppercorns

6 whole allspice berries

1⁄8 teaspoon mace

3⁄4 cup white or malt vinegar

1⁄2 cup black olives

2 tablespoons capers

1⁄2 cup roasted red peppers, sliced

1. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large frying pan. Add the onions, green peppers, garlic, and hot pepper, and cook over medium heat, about 10 minutes, until the onions are soft and golden. Remove from pan and set aside.

2. Dust the fish with salt and pepper and fry in the same pan until lightly browned on both sides and just cooked through, adding more oil as necessary.

3. Place the fish in a large, nonreactive dish. Put the onions and peppers on top.

4. In a saucepan, combine the spices with 1 cup water and salt and pepper, and simmer gently for 15 minutes. Add the vinegar and simmer for 2 minutes more.

5. Strain the liquid and pour over the fish. Serve hot or let cool and chill before serving. Garnish the fish with the olives, capers, and red peppers right before serving.

Serves 4 as a main dish, 8 as an appetizer

Piña Colada Cheesecake

This tropical twist on my mother’s old-fashioned cheesecake was a hit at cruiser gatherings.

For the crust

1 cup graham cracker crumbs

1⁄2 cup sweetened shredded coconut

1⁄3 cup melted butter

For the filling

11⁄2 pounds cream cheese, softened

2⁄3 cup sugar

4 eggs

3 tablespoons dark rum

1 cup sour cream

3⁄4 cup cream of coconut (see Tips, below)

2⁄3 cup well-drained crushed pineapple (about 1 19-oz can)

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2. To make the crust, combine graham cracker crumbs and coconut with melted butter. Press into the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan. Bake for 10 minutes until lightly browned. Set aside to cool while you make the filling.

3. To make the filling, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating until blended. Mix in rum, sour cream, cream of coconut, and well-drained pineapple.

4. Spread evenly on prepared crust and bake about 50–60 minutes on middle rack of preheated oven, until edges are set and center moves just slightly when you shake the pan.

5. Run a knife around the inside of pan to loosen cheesecake. Allow cake to cool completely on a wire rack. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled or overnight. Remove from springform pan before serving.

Serves 16

Tips

• Garnish the cheesecake with slices of tropical fruit, such as fresh pineapple or mango.

• Don’t confuse cream of coconut with coconut milk or coconut cream. Used to make drinks (such as piña coladas) and desserts, cream of coconut is thick, syrupy, heavily sweetened coconut milk. Coco Lopez is one popular brand.

One Last Lesson

. . . Sticky mango juice, running down my naked chest
And sturdy people who can still smile a mile of love into their pain
Put their shoulders to the wheel
And their Gods will do the rest
And in the end they will pass the test
Soca music, take me back to my island.

FROM “SONG FOR A LONELY SOUL” BY
DAVID MICHAEL RUDDER

Four years after we left, we return to Grenada—by plane—for a brief late-November visit. We stay in a small cottage on a low hillside overlooking the sea, and Hog Island, and the anchorage we loved.

As we lie in bed, we can see the masts of the sailboats at anchor in the distance. From our vantage point on the hill, the lines of reef we once blithely threaded are scarily visible.

But it is the wind that frightens me most now. It whistles through the palm fronds night and day, and when the regular wet season downpour arrives each afternoon, it drives the rain through our screens with such force that there are spatters clear across the room. On the other side of the bay, we can see plumes of spray shoot skyward where the waves crash on the rocks on the windward side of Hog Island. The wind is such a strong, constant background sound that I awaken when it stops briefly, in the hours just before dawn. Surely it was never like this when we were here on
Receta
? It
couldn’t
have been—I would have been anxious all the time if we had been living on a boat in this wind. It was, Steve assures me. I’ve simply forgotten. And I am astounded that this much wind once seemed commonplace. At night, the piping frogs still provide steady accompaniment.

When we pull a borrowed dinghy onto the little sand beach where the path led to Mr. Butters’s farm, the rusted Cuban gunboats seem to have settled lower in the water. The path is so overgrown now that, like the first time, I lose my way climbing the hill and return to the beach, my legs scratched and mud squishing out of my sandals. At some point, Mr. Butters was finally forced to leave. There’s no sign of his shacks, or any cultivated land. A bit of rare steak, however, still grazes on the hillside.

The goats still graze, too, outside Nimrod’s rum shop in Lower Woburn. But Hugh Nimrod passed away a couple of days before our return. It wasn’t the rum that killed him, but his heart.

We keep our eyes open for a 45-foot cutter named
Triton
—the Minister of Rum’s new office—but Ed must have already started his seasonal migration from Grenada up-island.
Tafia
, his previous boat, had been holed off the coast of Antigua about two years earlier, carried onto the fringing reef by the currents while Ed was making a solo night passage from St. Barts. Before she went down, Ed had time to escape in his dinghy—with his satellite phone and a bottle of twenty-one-year-old rum. Although the boat was lost, he went back in daylight and salvaged sixty-four more bottles.

In St. George’s, the Music City Record Centre is gone, and so is Pyramid, Steve’s favorite lunchtime haunt. Doc has moved to the northern end of the island; Basil has returned to Trinidad, the new tenants tell us. A big, bright fish market has been built across the street from the old one, which is now padlocked shut, and a couple of traffic lights have sprouted. But the produce market is unchanged—still a fragrant confusion of fruit and spices. Golden apples are in the greatest profusion at this time of year, but we hunt among the market ladies and find one glorious late-season mango to carry back to the cottage for breakfast.

A public bus takes us up the coast to Newlo. But unaccustomed to the roller-coaster roads, the sardine-can packing of passengers, and the all-encompassing heat, we are both woozy by the time we arrive for lunch. Secondhand computers have replaced the manual typewriters in Office Skills, but otherwise the place looks much the same—a jumble of crooked stairways and cubbyhole classrooms—belying its growth: Two satellite centers operate elsewhere on the island and an adult literacy program has been started.

We’re taken to the shed up the road, where students learn to build fiberglass sailing dinghies. A year ago, we had heard about a program started by former cruisers, now Grenadian residents, to teach the kids of Lower Woburn to sail, using dinghies constructed at Newlo. We loved the circle this closed and had immediately commissioned one: to be built by the kids at Newlo, to be given to the kids at Lower Woburn—and to be called, Steve’s choice, the
Annie V
. It was christened with Carib, we were told, and we see it later in the week, resting on the shore of Clarke’s Court Bay.

O
n our second morning on the island, we climb the road to Dingis’s house, and the colors—intense greens against flawless sky-blue above and turquoise below—are shocking to us, freed now only briefly from the monochromatic grays of a northern November. Each of us carries a bag with some gifts, including—as on one of our first trips—a batch of brownies. We had brought the ingredients from Canada, and I baked them this morning in our cottage. But we don’t know who or what we’ll find at the house behind the coconut palms and the breadfruit tree. Our most recent letters weren’t answered.

As we round the final curve before the blue-green house—me, dripping with sweat as ever—we see an oh-so-familiar woman tending the goats halfway up the hillside behind the house. “Good day,” Steve calls loudly from the foot of the drive. “I be down in a minute,” a voice sings back. I’m sure Dingis thinks a couple of strangers have arrived to buy lobster or lambi. But as she gets closer, she raises her hands to her cheeks. “It Ahhnnn and Steve, it Ahhnnn and Steve. Gennel, come quick, it Ahhnnn and Steve.”

Fifteen years old when we left, Gennel has become a raving beauty, just graduated from high school a few months ago and ready to enter a nursing course. “With God as my witness, I know in my heart you be back this year,” Dingis says. “You told us you return by Gennel graduation. I look for
Receta
each time I down in deh bay.”

Dingis has not forgotten that she never had a chance to show me how to make roti, and she’s simply
not
going to let this sudden opportunity escape: We
must
come back to the house in a day or two, she says, so I can properly learn to cook chicken curry and roti. That bit of planning out of the way, she and Gennel catch us up on what we’ve missed: Dwight is back, still limping and in some pain, but again fishing and lobstering; the four little girls are growing up, and Alisha soon arrives to prove it; the village is unchanged, except that the postmistress has become increasingly unreliable (explaining our unanswered letters, which Dingis and Gennel never received).

I
f you’d walked up the steep drive on Saturday, brushed by the two sleeping dogs—the excitable Stinky is gone (“someone tief him,” Dingis says)—and the clucking chickens, and peered into the dimness under the house, you would have seen me crushing cooked split peas with an empty rum bottle, kneading dough, pinching off little balls, hiding smashed split peas inside them, rolling out the balls into thin pancakes with the rum bottle and, finally, cooking them one by one on a hot greased griddle, my clumsy hands mimicking Dingis’s practiced motions.

And if you’d peered through the dense foliage behind the house, freshly washed by the afternoon rain, you would have seen Steve knocking young coconuts out of a tree to get us all coconut water to drink and, later, on the road with Gennel, helping Dwight bring a wheelbarrow of lobster, lambi, and fish up from “deh bay.” Later still, you would have seen him perched on a stool in the corner, knife in hand, up to his elbows in lambi slime and for once happy about it, helping Dingis and Dwight clean conch.

“Ahhnnn hand sweet,” Gennel pronounces when she tries the chicken curry and roti. “Ahhnnn hand
very
sweet,” adds Dingis.

Dingis’s Chicken Curry with Dhal Puri Roti

Not for the time-pressed. With two sets of hands, it took a good three hours to prepare this dish. Of course, at the same time, Dingis was telling me how to make pumpkin curry, mango chutney, and rice and peas with coconut milk, and stopping to chat with neighbors who wandered up to the house to buy a bag of lambi or a fresh fish.

Roti

For the dough

8 cups all-purpose flour

1 heaping tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup lard, shortening, or margarine

2–3 cups water (approx.)

For the dhal puri

1 cup dried yellow split peas, rinsed and picked over

2 cloves garlic, minced

1⁄2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon good-quality curry powder

2 teaspoons vegetable oil

Salt (to taste)

1 cup vegetable oil (approx.), for frying

1. To make the dough, in a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Cut in lard, shortening, or margarine with your fingers or two knives. Make a well in the center and add water a little at a time to make a soft dough. Knead lightly until smooth and elastic. Cover and “put it to rest for an hour,” as Dingis says.

2. While dough is resting, prepare dhal puri: Place split peas in a large saucepan with 6 cups of water and bring to a boil. Partially cover and cook over medium heat until peas are tender, about 20–25 minutes. Drain thoroughly, and return peas to pot with the garlic, pepper, curry powder, and the 2 teaspoons of oil. Cook, stirring occasionally, over low heat for about 5 minutes. Add salt to taste. Allow to cool.

3. Grind peas in food processor (or mash by rolling with a rum bottle or rolling pin) until mixture resembles coarse meal.

4. Spread a tea towel on the table or counter and sprinkle with flour. Knead the dough briefly again. Pinch off pieces and form into balls. (Each one should be a little smaller than a tennis ball; you should have about 12 to 16.) Flatten one of the balls until it is about the size of a saucer. Holding it in the palm of your hand, put a heaping tablespoon of the split-pea mixture in the center. Carefully pinch the dough closed to again form a ball, and smooth it by turning it in your hand. Repeat with the remaining balls, placing them on the tea towel and covering with another cloth.

5. Heat a griddle or large frying pan on the stove. Working on a floured surface, flatten one of the balls with your hand and then roll it into a circle (using a rolling pin or rum bottle) until it is about 8–9 inches in diameter.

6. Oil the hot griddle. (Dingis dips the bottom of a metal cup into a saucer of oil and then runs the cup over the surface of the griddle.) Using a spatula, carefully transfer the roti to the griddle. Blot the top of the roti with oil (the metal-cup method works well). Cook for 1–2 minutes. When the dough begins to bubble, flip the roti with the spatula and cook the other side for another 1–2 minutes. (The roti should be lightly browned on both sides.)

7. Remove roti from griddle and keep warm in a towel that has been lightly sprinkled with water. Repeat with remaining balls, wiping the griddle clean with a towel between roti.

Makes 12–16 roti

Chicken Curry

3–4 tablespoons vegetable oil

3 pounds small bone-in chicken pieces (cut chicken breasts in half or thirds if including)

1 large onion, chopped

2–3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons good-quality curry powder

1 teaspoon turmeric

1⁄2 lime, juiced

6 whole cloves

2 tablespoons ketchup

3⁄4 cup water or chicken stock (approx.)

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

3 white potatoes, cubed

1. Heat 3 tablespoons of the oil in a large heavy pot. Over medium-high heat, brown the chicken pieces in batches, until golden on all sides, adding more oil as necessary. Remove chicken and set aside.

2. In the same pot, cook the onion and garlic until the onions are golden. Sprinkle with the curry powder and the turmeric and stir for a minute or two. Return chicken to the pot and stir until the chicken has been coated with the curry.

3. Add remaining ingredients except for potatoes, cover, and simmer gently until the chicken is falling-off-the-bone tender, about 1–11⁄4 hours, stirring occasionally. Add the potatoes for the last 30–40 minutes of cooking time, putting in a little more water or stock if the mixture seems dry.

4. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve hot, with dhal puri roti on the side.

Serves 6–8

Tip

• To shorten the cooking and preparation time (and make for easier, if less authentic, eating), use boneless chicken and serve the curry with rice instead of roti.