An Embarrassment of Mangoes

by Ann Vanderhoof

  A couple of miles to the west of Hog Island is an almost completely enclosed lagoon surrounded by mangroves. Undeniably, we’d be much better protected there—if we could get in. The narrow reef-lined entrance will be tricky with the sea already starting to kick up and, more importantly, the protected portion is small and we don’t know how many boats have already staked out spots. If we leave to find out, our pretty-good space here will be scooped up in a nanosecond, as boats are already flooding in from islands to the north, seeking protection.

  We decide to stay with the devil we know—at least through one more forecast; if Georges swings even a tiny bit to the north, we will be just fine. Terry and Nancy on La Esmeralda—new, like us, to Caribbean hurricanes—decide to leave for the totally protected bay. “We’ll call you when we get there,” Nancy says, “and let you know what it looks like.” Meanwhile, we put out a second anchor and then a third to give us extra holding power. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of activity here, and Hog Island is its usual sleepy afternoon self. Old hands like Ed, the Minister of Rum, appear unconcerned.

  “We got in okay,” Nancy reports when she radioes as promised. “But if you’re coming, better come now. It’s gonna be tough when the waves get higher.”

  “Roger that. I think we’ll stay put.”

  Late in the day, we dinghy to the dock at Lower Woburn and walk up to Island View, the largest restaurant and bar in the village. It has great fries, and you can play dominoes on the patio while you wait for your food. But tonight the big attraction is the bar’s satellite TV. On the wide expanse of Clarke’s Court Bay the rising wind is noticeable. On shore, the goats maa nervously and the seed pods of the trees called mother-in-law’s tongues clack noisily. Inside, the crowd at the bar is jittery, waiting for the latest update on the Weather Channel.

  At the word “Georges,” the room falls silent. It is projected to become an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane, close to a Category 5—the highest category of any storm—with winds of 140 miles per hour. But the course has changed: It has finally started to track northwest instead of due west.

  A collective whoosh of relief, big easy swallows of beer, and again a buzz of conversation. But no one’s really jubilant. Grenada won’t get slammed, but someone else surely will—and soon. All of us—cruisers and locals—have friends or family on other islands.

  As it happens, Georges enters the Eastern Caribbean on Sunday night, 290 miles north of us, passing directly over Antigua. He vents his fury in turn on St. Kitts, Nevis, Statia, Saba, St. Martin, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Bahamas, Cuba, the Florida Keys, and the Gulf Coast of the United States.

  Receta barely rocks at anchor as we listen to ham operators hunkered down and broadcasting from the hurricane zone—to what is first a trickle and then a flood of damage reports. We’re praying the friends who decided to spend hurricane season in unprotected spots had time to run for shelter. An 85-foot yacht has been tossed out of the water and onto an airport runway on St. Martin; the huge steel-and-concrete cruise-ship dock on St. Kitts reduced to toothpicks and thrown out to sea; the airport on Saba totally destroyed and power knocked out on the entire island and not expected to be restored for two months; the Virgin Islands, clobbered. The worst savagery is on Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, where the unrelenting rainfall leads to mudslides that wipe out entire towns. But our beloved Luperón, we hear, sheltered more than sixty boats, and sheltered them well. Our friends spiderwebbed deep into the mangroves there are fine.

  At one point, we picked up a man transmitting out of St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, just after the calm at the eye of the hurricane passed overhead. “The eye is gone and now we’re getting the rest. I’ve got 20 knots, gusting 30. Now it’s 30, steady. Now I’ve got 40 knots and gusting. Now I’ve got . . .” And he faded out.

  Seventeen days, seven landfalls, 602 fatalities, and $5.9 billion in property damage. When a hurricane is unusually destructive, its name is retired “for reasons of sensitivity” and never used again. Only forty hurricane names have been retired since 1954. Georges is one of them.

  A few days after the hurricane scare, Ed invites us over for dinner, to help him consume a new rum that’s come his way and a mess of kingfish he’s bought cheap at the market. As Steve and I are belowdecks putting a few things into a carry bag to take to dinner, we hear voices, close.

  We both bound into the cockpit. It’s just after dark and a light is flickering off to our port side—where a powerboat is hanging off the float that marks the position of one of the extra anchors we put out before the hurricane and haven’t lifted yet. “They must have snagged their prop on our float line,” Steve says. “I’d better go see if I can help.” And he hops in Snack and heads off.

  A few minutes later, I can hear Snack slowly returning. Steve is towing the powerboat back to Receta. It’s the local Coast Guard boat. Whoops.

  Steve ties it off to our stern and pulls himself alongside the cockpit. “Are they seriously pissed off at us?” I ask him softly. “Are we in deep shit?”

  “No, it has nothing to do with us. They didn’t run into our line. They just grabbed the anchor float to stop themselves from drifting onto the reef when their engine died.” This, in itself, is almost amusing; Steve, who has no conception of time anymore, thinks it’s hilarious.

  “What happens now?” I ask, eyeing the boat strung out behind Receta and knowing that, even by island time, we’re going to be very late for dinner at the Minister’s.

  “They can’t seem to get it restarted—I think they may have flooded it at this point. The head guy says they radioed another boat to come and get them, but he asked if I would mind running him into the Hog Island beach. I couldn’t say no—it’ll only take another five minutes.” And with that, he starts Snack’s engine and heads back to the powerboat. I go below to radio Ed to let him know we’re going to be more than a few minutes late. “We’ll explain why when we get there.” “Roger that,” he says. I figure it would be impolitic to discuss a Coast Guard breakdown on the open airwaves. More than impolitic, as it turns out.

  Steve, meanwhile, putts gently to the transom of the Coast Guard boat to pick up his passenger. But before he’s even stopped the dinghy, two Coast Guard guys jump in without a word. They aren’t dressed for your average walk on the beach. Both are wearing camouflage fatigues, with life jackets on top, and military-issue black leather boots. The head guy is carrying an automatic rifle, and the other, a zillion-watt searchlight, turned off.

  Not knowing what else to do—they are the Coast Guard, after all, and we are visitors in their country—Steve just switches on his light and turns toward the beach.

  “No lights, please,” says the head guy, exceedingly polite, but leaving no room for disagreement. “And can you go around that way, please?” He draws a curve in the air that winds between other anchored cruisers and ends up at the far end of the beach, away from the usual landing spot.

  It’s very dark, and the requested route to shore takes further advantage of the darkness around the anchored boats that don’t have lights on. When Snack reaches the knee-deep water about 40 feet off the beach, the head guy announces, “Stand off here, please, and wait for us.” Steve cuts the engine, and the two of them leap out of the dinghy and run full blast for the beach—“kind of like a two-man version of the landing at Normandy,” Steve relates. “Then faster than you can say marijuana, they have their huge searchlight on, and the one with the gun is lining up some of the local guys against the wall of the beach lean-to.” He and Snack have been commandeered for a raid—a drug bust, which the recalcitrant engine on the Coast Guard boat had threatened to spoil.

  We really like the local guys on the beach. Steve knows most of them by now, thanks to Phillip, his “lobsta stick” mentor. “Dis mah friend Steve,” he says every time Steve shows up at the shack now, taking him around for introductions and the bumped-fist handshakes that are the greeting between younger local men.
“He know deh families in deh village.” Steve is horrified—first, that he might be helping to get these guys in trouble with the law, and second, that they might find out exactly how the Coast Guard got to the beach.

  A valid concern, since a fishing boat carrying two more local guys has just pulled straight up to the beach and the driver is panning the water with his flashlight. “Where’s your boat? How’d you get here?” he angrily asks the Coast Guarders—who were waiting for this boat and now have the gun trained on it. Steve, meanwhile, ducks low in the dinghy and shields his face when the new arrival’s light arcs in Snack’s direction.

  “Turn out deh light.” The rifle is quite persuasive, and the flashlight disappears.

  The bust, however, is a bust: The guys are apparently all clean. They disperse rapidly, the local boats roaring off the beach—luckily not near where Steve waits—and the two Coast Guarders eventually wade back out to their landing craft.

  “When I drop them back at their boat, the head guy tells me he’ll be coming by with a check to compensate me for my help.” He shudders at the thought. “I told him politely that he absolutely didn’t need to bother.” At this point, two Coast Guard boats are tied behind Receta, the second having arrived to help the first. “And we’re not telling anyone what happened tonight.”

  Except the Minister of Rum, of course: You need a good excuse when you’re more than an hour late for a dinner invitation, and being conscripted to aid and abet the Coast Guard in a bust works just fine.

  Ed, who’s visited more than one illegal still in the course of his rum research, can be trusted to keep quiet. And, besides, he knows all the local scuttlebutt. Sure, people do occasionally whip up to St. Vincent, where grass is grown, and then buzz back down to Grenada after dark, but it’s no surprise to Ed that nobody got caught tonight. “The local guys would have been warned something was up,” he explains while he fries the kingfish and we sip ’ti punches. “So they wouldn’t have made a run. Besides, they always post somebody on the point with a light to signal, just in case.”

  A couple of days later, a smaller Coast Guard boat pulls up to Receta in the middle of the day. We hope no one on the beach is watching. The head Coast Guard guy from the other night is on board, just come to say thank you. To our relief, he doesn’t offer up a check. But we get the feeling that for the rest of our stay in Grenada, we’re safe from the Coast Guard inspections that foreign cruising boats are periodically given.

  Mango season is waning. The perfumed piles in the market have shrunk and the price has grown. The real sign, though, is that there are none at all at the Marketing & National Import Board, where the bins reflect what the local growers currently have in abundance. A few weeks ago, one wall was lined with baskets of mangoes: Julies, Ceylons, Calivignys, and Peach mangoes. Now, we console ourselves with the voluptuous avocados that have replaced them.

  Back home, food is divorced from the seasons, every fruit and vegetable imported from somewhere year-round. Here, we eat what comes ripe, and the reward is the taste. Before this, I don’t think we knew what an avocado should taste like. The bananas have an almost forgotten banana flavor; the silky papayas expose the ones back home as dull imposters; the greens have unexpectedly strong, assertive personalities.

  On my most recent trip to Mr. Butters’s, I had again been hoping to get some of his pungent escarole to turn into topping for pasta, but again his escarole beds are picked clean. Instead, I leave with a bunch of callaloo.

  Steve watches me dubiously as I chop up the heart-shaped leaves. “We’ve only seen it served as soup,” he points out. Callaloo—the thick green soup is called by the same name as its main ingredient—is ubiquitous throughout the West Indies. Every cook has their own version: some with crab, some with salt pork or beef, some with okra, some with coconut milk, some with evaporated cow’s milk, some without any milk at all.

  “It’s a leafy green vegetable, same as escarole—I’m sure it will work just fine on the pasta,” I reply.

  While I’m transferring the chopped callaloo from the cutting board to the pan where the garlic is sautéing, I drop a piece on the floor. And just as I would do at home, I pick it up without thinking and pop it in my mouth.

  The effect is almost immediate. My throat is on fire, and it’s a worse fire than the one caused by Nimrod’s rum: I’m being poked from the inside out by a million little glass slivers. I gulp water, then beer, to no effect. Steve’s ready to hustle me into the dinghy to go to shore, and a doctor, but behind the pain is a dim recollection. “Check the cruising guide,” I croak.

  Our guide for this part of the world includes a few pages about island food at the back—and there it is, read once a long time ago and forgotten: Callaloo should never be eaten raw or undercooked. The leaves contain calcium oxalate crystals, which cause “discomfort,” as the book calls it; a bit understated, I’d say, when I feel like I’ve swallowed a fistful of nettles. The effect is temporary, though, the guide goes on to explain, and there is no permanent damage. “To use callaloo as a vegetable, boil it with a little salt for at least 30 minutes.”

  I turn up the heat and cook it so thoroughly it becomes a pool of green-brown sludge.

  The “christophene saltfish cakes” that the market ladies told me how to make are a much more successful attempt at using local ingredients than callaloo pasta sauce. “Write the recipe down,” Steve tells me while devouring a plate of the crispy fried cakes. “Right now, before you forget what you did.”

  He’s been telling me to write a lot of things down lately, as I attempt local dishes and substitute island fruits and vegetables in the ones I cooked back home. I make latkes with grated plantains instead of potatoes, and serve them with mango salsa instead of applesauce. (No apple trees in this part of the world.) I use christophene instead of zucchini in my zucchini bread recipe, and papaya in my banana muffins. The muffins are fruit-sweet and moist and, as a bonus, a lovely color. “Write it down, write it down, write it down.” Steve hasn’t exactly been keeping quiet about my galley adventures and the interesting stuff he’s been eating, and sometimes I find myself fielding questions from other cruisers like some culinary advice columnist. Unfortunately, I’m hardly an expert.

  Dingis had already given me a lesson on making “regular” saltfish cakes, but the “christophene saltfish cakes” the market ladies had suggested were new to me. “Saltfish” once meant salted cod almost exclusively. For New England and Nova Scotia, the Caribbean was a low-end market, a place to unload their second-rate salted-and-dried cod, where it provided cheap food for the slaves on the sugar plantations. In fact, “West India” became the commercial name for the lowest grade of saltfish. These days, it’s no longer the cheap food it once was, thanks to the decline of the North Atlantic cod fishery, but it’s still a popular ingredient in Caribbean cooking.

  “Buy a nice tick piece of it,” Dingis had told me. “Not deh little ones—dey boney.” In Grenada, some locally caught and salted fish—shark, mostly—now shares space on store shelves with a variety of saltfish imported from Europe.

  Christophene, meanwhile, had become a staple on Receta months back in the Dominican Republic, where it’s called tayota. The pale-green squash-like vegetable is available in North American supermarkets—it goes by a variety of names including chayote, chayote squash, vegetable pear, cho-cho, and mirliton (especially in Louisiana)—but I had never really appreciated it until I became a cruiser. It’s the perfect onboard vegetable: cheap, available year-round, and hardy. (It keeps extremely well just slung in a hammock without refrigeration, a real bonus on a cruising boat.) Because of its delicate flavor, christophene is also versatile: It can be sliced raw into salads for crunch (even the almond-like seed in the center makes good eating); boiled, baked, stuffed or sautéed; added to stews, stir fries, and curries; and turned into soup. “Good for deh stomach,” one of the market ladies tells me, patting her ample midsection approvingly. Another cruiser swears it can be used to make a mock apple pie.
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br />   But how do I turn it into those christophene saltfish cakes? Just grate some christophene and some onion, the ladies tell me—“maybe carrot too,” one of them interjects—add chopped seasoning pepper, garlic, and sive and thyme. Mix in a little “counter flour”—this is coarse flour, I’ve by now figured out, rather than the more finely ground flour used in baking—and a “tick” of baking powder (which is, I think, a smaller unit of measurement than a “tip”). Then fry them in hot oil.

  “And what do I do with the saltfish?” They shake their heads pityingly and laugh: “Dere no saltfish, girl.” Okay, I get it: Christophene saltfish cakes are good for deh budget, too. They’re made with christophene instead of saltfish.

  Papaya-Banana Muffins

  This recipe is a solution to the problem of too much ripe tropical fruit. These muffins have lovely color and flavor, and are nice and moist.

  12⁄3 cups flour

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1⁄4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

  1 egg

  1⁄3 cup oil

  3⁄4 cup sugar

  1 cup mashed ripe papaya

  1⁄2 cup mashed ripe banana (1 large banana)

  1⁄4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

  1. Preheat oven to 375°F and grease a medium-sized muffin pan or line it with muffin papers.

  2. Combine dry ingredients and set aside.

  3. Beat egg with oil, sugar, and mashed papaya and banana in a large bowl.

  4. Mix in dry ingredients and walnuts (if using). Scoop mixture into prepared muffin pan. Bake in preheated oven for 18–23 minutes, until toothpick inserted in the middle of a muffin comes out clean.