An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  The fishermen then cut off the other unappetizing bits—the eye stalks and the trunklike snout—but warn Steve and Todd to leave the claw on until the very end: They’ll need it for a handle while they pull away the conch’s leathery, slime-coated skin, a task accomplished with the knife, pliers—or one’s teeth. Now the conch is ready for pounding.

  In the hands of a pro, the cleaning process takes maybe thirty seconds. Novices, however, are advised to set to work well before they want dinner.

  The cracked conch is a huge hit, and the birthday girl pretends to ignore the devastation in her galley. We serve it in real Bahamian fashion, accompanied by hot sauce and the staple side dish, peas ’n’ rice. By the time we finish the chocolate birthday cake, the stuffed sleepy looks around the table make it seem highly doubtful that anything will be rising on any of our boats tonight.

  I’m not sure about this way of life I’ve bought into. Mother Nature is the keeper of the Day-Timers now, and there’s not a thing I can do about it: We’re trapped at Chub Cay for nine days before the wind lays down enough to let us leave.

  And squalls and strong, blustery weather continue to torment us when we can finally move into the Exumas, the group of 365 mostly uninhabited islands and cays that stretch in a long necklace for 120 miles from Nassau to the Tropic of Cancer. At one cay, we anchor behind a big catamaran named Penelope. Everyone on board wears a T-shirt emblazoned: “Penelope—The El Niño Tour.” It seems we’ve unwittingly signed on, too. At least there are no more gales.

  Receta sits suspended in liquid air off Allan’s Cay, casting a shadow on the sand 10 feet beneath us. The water is placid, soft, blazingly turquoise—a pool of melted gemstones that seduces us into forgetting the other days, when Receta was corralled at one cay or another, bucking in the waves.

  We’ve come to Allan’s Cay to see the rock iguanas, a threatened species that lives here, on two neighboring cays, and nowhere else in the world; only four to five hundred of the reptiles remain. When we pull the dinghy up on the deserted beach, they slowly emerge from the scrub, having learned (from tour groups) the sound of an engine means the possibility of a handout: grapes presented on the ends of sticks, bits of lettuce, slices of cantaloupe. Soon the sand is littered with the 3-foot-long prehistoric-looking things. Though we offer them nothing, they stick around, their attitude somewhere between somnolent and watchful, their mouths set in permanent anticipatory grins.

  The clear water makes it all too apparent there are no conch around the cay for easy picking. But it doesn’t matter: Steve has spotted a local boat with shells piled in its bow, and he dinghies over. These conch are $1.50 apiece—but for that price the guys clean and pound them, for which I am grateful, since I’m cooking in my own galley tonight. And they throw in a couple of fillets from a grouper they’ve speared, gratis, as part of the deal.

  Perry and Noel are their names, and along with the conch come more—unsolicited—stories of its power. “My wife glad when I go fishin’ for a coupla days ’cause den she get a rest,” Perry says. And Noel explains the effect of what he calls “coo-coo soup”: If a woman cooks it for you and you eat it, you won’t want to make love with anyone but her—not his words precisely, but that’s the tamed translation Steve gives me when he returns. Unfortunately (from my point of view), they don’t tell him how the soup is made, but they do provide instructions for preparing conch on the barbecue, topped with garlic, onion, sweet pepper, and tomato. “Taste just like lobster,” Perry says, once again stressing, with appropriate hand gestures, the potent results.

  It doesn’t really taste like lobster—but it is delicious: as sweet and rich, but with a different texture and flavor. We scarf down five conch between us, and I can hardly wait to get my hands on more to make the recipe again.

  Steve notices, uh, nothing different. Me neither. And he isn’t throwing glances at other women (at least I don’t catch him), even though I don’t make him coo-coo soup. Despite checking every Bahamian cookbook I come across, I never find a recipe.

  I was looking in the wrong spot, I discover much later. I needed to check a guide to Bahamian English, not a cookbook.

  I eventually find the entry in More Talkin’ Bahamian by Patricia Glinton-Meicholas: not coo-coo, but cuckoo soup, as in the bird that has a habit of laying its eggs in other birds’ nests, from which comes the word “cuckold.” “Talk has it,” Glinton-Meicholas writes, “that if you are a man of the age of consent in The Bahamas, you tend to avoid dark, multi-ingredient soups . . . It might be cuckoo soup into which certain bodily fluids have been put to ‘tame’ you . . .” Her mother tells the story of a young man who throws a bowl of soup out the window, suspecting it is of the dreaded cuckoo variety. One of the family pigs eats it and within minutes is running around and shouting, “I want to get married, I want to get married.”

  Much later still, I have a chance to ask a trio of sophisticated, stylish Bahamian women for their opinion on the power of conch. Two of them dismiss it scornfully as just male rubbish. The third one smiles. “Anything you believe can work, can work,” she says.

  Norman’s Cay, to the south of Allan’s, is a long, skinny upside-down U of low-lying coral and sand covered with scrubby vegetation. Between the arms of the U, near its open end, a DC-3 lies three-quarters submerged in a few feet of water, a short snorkel from where Receta is anchored in a deeper portion of the cut. In the late seventies and early eighties, Norman’s was a transshipment center for the Medellin cartel; the DC-3 was making a delivery, and didn’t quite make it to the airstrip.

  So much drug money passed through the cay in those years—$3 billion worth of cocaine, so the story goes—that the cash was weighed, not counted. The Bahamian government of the time was persuaded to turn a blind eye, and visitors were discouraged; bullet holes from the discouragement are visible in the derelict, overgrown buildings near the water’s edge.

  Eventually, the DEA convinced the Bahamians to take action, the cartel was forced out, and the cay abandoned.

  “We can’t go in for a beer,” Steve says with dismay. “We don’t have any money.” We’re both staring at a minuscule, palm frond–roofed bar and a handful of pastel cottages that shimmer like a mirage in the afternoon heat on the supposedly deserted cay. A sign warns us to look both ways before crossing the old drug-runners’ airstrip, which lies between us and the mirage. A couple of small planes—not at all mirage-like—are tethered on the scrub at the edge of its cracked concrete. On the other side, the overgrown vegetation turns abruptly into tended grounds, tropical plantings, and conch shell–lined walks; the open ocean glitters behind the buildings.

  We’ve come to shore for an afternoon walk because once again the wind is blowing stink and Receta is hobbyhorsing on her anchor chain, making it less than comfy onboard. We’re stiff from the previous night’s sleep too—since we had to continually tense our muscles to keep from being tossed around in our berth like sacks of potatoes. To work out the kinks, we’d first gone on a snorkeling (and conching) expedition, but cut it short when the waves and current made it more work than fun. So we threw on dryish shorts and Ts, and ran the dinghy up on the beach to explore the deserted cay instead—without even a dollar in our pockets. Why would we bring money when our guidebooks assure us there’s nothing at all here beyond the derelict, pockmarked vestiges of the drug-running era? And then, about a half-mile up the cay’s cratered road, we stumble on this. “MacDuff’s,” a Scottie dog–shaped sign says.

  The surreal watering hole is still there when we return late the next afternoon with cash. Inside, the blond, heavily tanned guy behind the bar wears a tank top and a tiny Speedo and grooves to Jimmy Buffett. In fact, Dale Harshbarger even looks like Jimmy Buffett. Our request for Kaliks completely wipes out the supply of the Bahamian beer in his cooler. Business has been brisk recently, he says, and it’s hard to calculate how much he’ll need at his tiny, just-getting-going bar, when patrons must fly in on their own planes or sail in on their own boats and then happen upo
n the place.

  Ponytailed and laidback all the way to the sixties, the bikini-clad Dale makes popcorn while I slowly extract his story, my old journalism antennae quivering. A pilot himself, he had been flying around in the early nineties—he mentions the words “midlife crisis” at this point—trying to find a piece of property with beach on one side and an airstrip on the other, when he spotted a little ad in an aviation magazine for this spot on Norman’s Cay. He bought it and set to work turning it into an outpost of Margaritaville, fixing it up bit by bit while getting the word out to pilots that they’d no longer be greeted by guns if they landed. The bar opened just a couple of months back, and its spiritual inspiration, Jimmy Buffett himself, had already visited in the flesh, landing his plane on the weed-sprouting airstrip. Or so the sole other patron of the bar this afternoon—who, no surprise, is also a pilot—tells us when Dale wanders off.

  “You didn’t have to worry about not having money,” he says. Dale is already accustomed to running chits for unsuspecting cruisers who come ashore and then stumble on the bar as we did, parched and penniless.

  The next evening, MacDuff’s is positively packed—granted, it takes only eight bodies to pack the place. Local pilots Mike and Mike, who occupy two of the stools, have done a run to Nassau in their plane and picked up a fresh supply of the desperately needed Kalik. They’re introduced by their nicknames, which reflect what people here usually say to them: “I Need a This” and “I Need a That.” They’ve also picked up a sack of groceries for Mary and Scott, off the sailboat Partner-Ship, who occupy two more of the stools. They’ve been here before, and needed this and needed that and knew enough to ask. Yesterday’s pilot is back again, this time with his wife, and they fill the other end of the bar. CNN Weather flickers on the satellite TV, and although the volume’s turned way down—you don’t interfere with the Buffett tunes—it still commands regular attention from this group of pilots and sailors.

  Until, that is, the satellites cut out. The sky has blackened, and one of those regular squalls begins to hammer the building, rain dancing on the palm fronds and slanting through the screens. No windows that close in this bar. And in short order, water is pouring through the unfinished cupola at the center of the roof. The regulars calmly adjust their stools to avoid the deluge (mostly unsuccessfully), don the rain gear they’ve cleverly brought along, and continue to drink their beers. Dale continues to serve behind the bar—but with one hand now, since the other is holding a large open umbrella. “Your personal Mary Poppins,” he says. “Louvers for the roof are on the list, but they’re way behind a steady supply of Kalik.”

  I Need a This (or is it I Need a That?) launches into a tale of another storm, featuring fallen trees and downed power lines. But Dale’s generator continues to crank without interruption—at least until, several Kaliks later, the rain slackens enough for Steve and me to trot the half-mile back across the airstrip and down the now deeply puddled road, past the shot-up buildings to the beach and our dinghy, me laughing—and weaving—the whole way.

  Cracked Conch

  This dish is well worth a bit of mess in the galley. Fresh conch is sometimes available in specialty fish markets and in some Asian grocery stores; ask your local fishmonger if he or she can order it for you.

  4 large conch, cleaned

  4 limes

  2 large eggs

  1⁄2 cup water

  Hot sauce

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1 cup dried bread crumbs, cracker meal, finely crushed corn flakes, or matzoh meal

  1⁄2 cup vegetable oil (approx.)

  1. Slice conch lengthwise into thin slices and then pound the slices until they are almost translucent. Squeeze the juice from two of the limes over the sliced conch and allow to sit for a few minutes.

  2. Mix eggs, water, a few dashes of hot sauce, and salt and pepper in a bowl.

  3. Combine crumbs and more salt and pepper on a plate or in a plastic bag.

  4. Dip a few pieces of prepared conch in the egg mixture, then in the crumbs. Shake off excess.

  5. Heat a shallow layer of oil in a large skillet. Fry a few slices of the conch just until golden. Repeat with the remaining slices, adding more oil to the skillet as necessary.

  6. Drain on paper towels. Serve with the remaining limes, cut into quarters, and hot sauce.

  Serves 4

  Tips

  • The cracked conch can be deep-fried if desired.

  • Bahamians often dip and fry the whole conch without slicing it. Simply pound it until it is double its original size and then marinate it for an hour in lime juice and a bit of chopped hot pepper before cooking.

  Perry and Noel’s “Tastes Like Lobster” Conch

  If you can’t get fresh conch, try this recipe with monkfish. A firm-textured fish with a mild, sweet flavor, monkfish is sometimes called “poor man’s lobster”—making it an appropriate choice for this dish. Monkfish will require about double the time on the grill.

  4 tablespoons butter

  4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

  4 large conch, cleaned and tenderized

  1 onion, thinly sliced

  1 sweet green or red bell pepper, thinly sliced

  1 tomato, diced

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  1⁄4 cup white wine

  1. Butter four large pieces of heavy aluminum foil. Sprinkle each with a little of the sliced garlic.

  2. Put one of the cleaned and tenderized conch on each piece of foil. Top each with 1⁄4 of the onion, pepper, and tomato, and the rest of the garlic. Dot with remaining butter, season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with the white wine.

  3. Tightly seal the packages and cook on a preheated barbecue for about 8–10 minutes.

  Serves 4

  Bahamian Peas ’n’ Rice

  “Every cook have his own recipe,” one of the friendly young fishermen on the boat Heaven Sent said when he gave me the basics of his version of this staple side dish. The “peas” are the small speckled-brown pigeon peas grown in backyard gardens throughout the islands, closer to black-eyed peas in look and taste than the sweet green variety. They are mostly sold canned or dried.

  2 tablespoons vegetable oil

  1 small onion, diced

  1⁄4 cup chopped celery

  1⁄4–1⁄2 small hot pepper, seeded and finely chopped (or to taste)

  2 tablespoons tomato paste

  1 cup cooked pigeon peas or black-eyed peas

  1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme or 1⁄2 teaspoon dried thyme

  1 teaspoon salt

  Freshly ground black pepper

  11⁄2 cups water

  1 cup uncooked rice

  Hot sauce

  1. In a heavy pot, heat oil. Cook onion, celery, and hot pepper for a few minutes until softened but not browned.

  2. Add tomato paste and cook for 2–3 minutes.

  3. Stir in pigeon peas, thyme, salt, and pepper. Add water and bring mixture to a boil. Stir in rice, reduce heat, and cook, covered, over low heat until water is absorbed and rice is done to taste, about 20–25 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and allow to stand, covered, for about 10 minutes. Fluff rice with a fork, and serve with hot sauce.

  Serves 3–4

  Tip:

  • Many peas ’n’ rice recipes include some diced salt pork, which is fried until crisp. The onion, celery, and pepper are then cooked in the fat rendered from the pork.

  Escape from

  Chicken Harbor

  I’ve seen countless cases of the fear of night sails leading a cruising couple into problems. . . . Far from being a scary enemy, the dark is more often than not the cruiser’s friend.

  BRUCE VAN SANT, THE GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO

  PASSAGES SOUTH, 1996

  . . . I have no desire to sail strange waters at night.

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS IN HIS SHIP’S LOG, OCTOBER 15,

  1492, WHEN HE WAS EXPLORING THE SOUTHERN BAHAMAS

&nb
sp; Christine Rolle is looking for a husband, and she’s settled on Steve. A wiry Bahamian in her mid-sixties, she’s dressed formally despite the heat: tan trousers and matching vest, long-sleeved oxford shirt buttoned to the neck, western-style string tie. I’ve arranged for Christine to take a few of us on a day trip around Great Exuma, the large island near the bottom of the Exuma chain. Before we start off, she serves us some sweet panfried cakes and a deep green tea she’s brewed from avocado leaves—“very cooling in the hot summertime,” she says, making it clear that this March day, with its temperature in the low eighties, doesn’t come close to qualifying.

  I make the mistake of asking how to make the yummy little cakes. “See, she doesn’t even know how to cook,” she says to Steve, pointedly ignoring me and my question.

  Born and raised on Great Exuma, Christine is a bit of an island oddity: an unmarried female entrepreneur. She owns a general store in the settlement of Farmer’s Hill, at the north end of the island overlooking the rugged windward coast. But she also manages property for absentee owners, has her own minibus taxi, runs a highly acclaimed tour service, and is a specialist in Bahamian bush medicine. Her search for a husband is part of her schtick, and I unwittingly play right into her hands.

  “If you lived with me,” she says to Steve, offering him another cake, “you could have these all the time.” And with that pronouncement hanging in the air, she slides into the driver’s seat and we’re off.

  A few minutes later, she pulls to the side of the road and leaves the minibus without a word, disappearing into the dry underbrush. “She’s gone for a pee,” says one of the female passengers, and the rest of us women nod knowingly. Perhaps—but she returns with an armload of greenery and dumps it at the front of the minibus before driving on. She repeats the process a few more times, until she’s accumulated a small mountain of branches, vines, berries, and fruit behind the driver’s seat. This, she eventually tells us between trips into the scrub, will be the basis of our bush-medicine lesson.