The owner of the nursery in Florida where I had bought the plants gave me his only rule for gardening in the tropics. The recipe was simple, the man said: “Just add water and bake.” The reliable Anguilla sun easily handled the baking. Water was the problem. A rare and precious commodity, water was in short supply. June and July had brought no rain. To fill our cistern from the island’s desalinization plant took three truckloads of water—about 7,500 gallons—and cost us $300. Our thirsty garden drained the cistern and our checkbook every five days. Shabby and Clinton watched with mild disapproval as we diligently drenched the ground surrounding the restaurant. We had created a garden monster.
The Davis brothers were skilled masons but enjoyed learning to build with wood as much as Bob liked being educated in the local patois. But Rocky, the oldest brother, needed more translation than the others. Perhaps he watched less TV, or maybe he had less contact with tourists; whatever it was, Rocky’s conversations were impossible to interpret. “Busithoffhelongtoo,” he said with lightning speed, handing Bob a piece of wood.
As Bob continued to stare blankly, Rocky slowed down a little. “Busit hoff he long too.”
Clinton translated. “Bust it in half, he want it shorter.”
Shabby chimed in. “He wants you to cut that piece of wood for him. It’s too long.”
The days were hard and hot, and we couldn’t bear the thought of cooking dinner. We became regulars at a local barbecue place half a mile up the road. Bernice was the proprietor of this low-budget, backyard operation made up of a homemade grill like the one we’d cooked our lunch on in Barbados years ago, a fryer, three plastic tables, and an Igloo cooler filled with ice-covered drinks. Extension cords stretched overhead to several bare lightbulbs that dangled from the fronds of a palm tree swinging in the breeze.
When we arrived, the grill would be heaped with ribs and chicken legs, and the island staple, rice and peas, was always simmering in a slow cooker on a nearby plywood table. Bernice, in her oversized Calvin Klein T-shirt, wielded a cleaver in one hand and a family-sized bottle of Kraft barbecue sauce in the other. There was no need to advertise here: a big speed bump in the main road in front of Bernice’s house did the job. Each passing car—after much tooting and waving—slowed to a crawl to clear the bump, getting a whiff of the smoky barbecue aroma. Madison Avenue couldn’t have created a better marketing campaign.
I loved gardening and helping with the construction. The menu was beginning to scare me, however—especially when I pictured the fashionable and unforgiving crowd that might be waiting to test my culinary skills. I was familiar with their expectations, having eavesdropped on nearby tables in the Malliouhana dining room. Firmly believing that the entire kitchen staff was at their personal disposal, diners would ask, “Would the chef mind terribly preparing something special for my wife tonight? Tell him it’s for Mrs. Lawrence. She has a craving for veal piccata; make sure he pounds it extra thin, though. Be a dear and see what he can do.”
I knew it was time to stop playing in the dirt and turn my attention to food. Comfortably settled on the couch in our living room, I surrounded myself with dozens of my favorite cookbooks, restaurant menus amassed over the years, and piles of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. Four blank pads of paper were neatly lined up on the coffee table—one each for appetizers, salads, main courses, and desserts.
I poured through hundreds of recipes, sorting, studying, evaluating, and choosing those worthy of a trial run. I rejected any dishes with heavy sauces and time-intensive reductions, while those with fresh salsas and flavorful herbs and spices went on my test list. Desserts required sublists for baked, frozen, fruit, and chocolate.
Fascinating articles about food trends distracted me, though I don’t think of myself as trendy. Food, however, is an entirely different story. I will go to great lengths to taste something new. Extreme lengths. When the day came to send Jesse off to college, we could have bought him a plane ticket from Vermont to Walla Walla, Washington. Instead, the three of us drove over three thousand miles on back roads. You miss everything at 70 mph, and fast food along the interstates was of no interest to us. Following tiny gray lines on the map, we meandered across the country for almost a month tasting the regional foods of America. We arrived at Jesse’s dorm five pounds heavier, having sampled our way from New England to the Pacific Northwest. We can tell you where to get melt-in-your-mouth biscuits with fresh peach preserves in Memphis, the finest barbecue in San Antonio, the crustiest sourdough in San Francisco, and a wondrous cedar-smoked salmon in Seattle.
Food is an obsession, perhaps even an addiction, that started in seventh grade when I would rush home to watch Julia Child prepare beef bourguignon. Her enthusiasm was contagious. Creating the menu for my own restaurant in Anguilla made me feel like Julia. I was inspired just reading recipes for chili-crusted sea scallops and Jamaican jerk sauce. Lists evolved day by day.
The testing began. Thomas was kind enough to bring me several lobsters that arrived in a lively, squirming burlap bag. I peeked inside, debating the best form of attack. What is it about lobsters, anyway? In Maine they have vicious claws that snap at your fingers. These had no claws but were completely covered with spines and were just as treacherous to handle. With two giant oven mitts, I grasped the first creature by the antennae and lowered it gingerly into a pot. Scalding water showered the kitchen, but I bravely emptied the bag.
I rolled out dough for dumplings—very thin so they’d be tender, almost transparent, when cooked—and cut them into circles. With the lobster meat cooled and diced, I added wild mushrooms, shallots, ginger, and a tiny bit of goat cheese to hold the mixture together. I dropped a spoonful of filling into the center of each circle and crimped the edges into little half-moons ready for steaming. I glazed the tiny bundles with fresh lemon juice, more ginger, a little garlic, a spoonful of sugar, and some soy sauce. The first batch didn’t have enough lobster, the next had too much lemon. My crimping technique slowly improved. Sometimes the dough would tear or the egg used to seal the dough wouldn’t stick. But after repeated attempts I had perfected my first appetizer.
The Caribbean is known for its jerk sauce, and I tested eight different recipes before concocting my own variation. The final list of eighteen ingredients included ten different herbs and spices, fresh lime and orange juice, and that hottest of hot peppers, habaneros. Those fiery little devils came in a rainbow of colors, which I initially suspected might reveal their level of heat, but I was wrong—they were all hotter than hell. My eyes watered and burned; my fingertips were on fire for days.
Grilled Tuna with Coconut Rice Cakes
My love of Asian food prompted me to come up with an easy marinade for grilled tuna served with crispy coconut rice cakes. For two recipes so easy, the contrast of flavors and texture was a great discovery.
Make the rice cakes first. You will need a jelly-roll pan approximately 10 by 15 inches. In a saucepan, bring 7H cups water and 1H cups unsweetened coconut milk to a boil. Add 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and 4 1/2 cups Agatha rice. Cover and reduce heat to very low. Cook for 20 minutes or until liquid is absorbed. Transfer rice to a bowl and stir in 4 minced scallions and 1/4 cup toasted sesame seeds. Press mixture firmly into jelly-roll pan. I cover it with plastic wrap and use a rolling pin to make it even and compact. Chill well. When ready to serve, cut into 3-inch squares and then in half into triangles. Brush with olive oil, dust with bread crumbs, and sauté until golden brown on both sides. Makes 30 triangles.
Have 6 tuna steaks cut 2 inches thick so it’s easy to cook them rare. Marinate the fish for about an hour in 1 1/4 cups teriyaki sauce, 1/3 cup cooking sherry, 1 tablespoon minced ginger, 4 minced scallions, 1 teaspoon minced garlic, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, and 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice. Grill quickly over hot coals and serve immediately. Serves six.
Grilled whole snapper on a bed of sauteed corn and spinach with Thai curry sauce; smoked salmon bundles filled with crab salad and a lemon-chive crème fra�
�che; crispy coconut prawns with homemade apricot chutney; lemon-buttermilk pound cake topped with homemade vanilla bean ice cream and fresh berries; mangoes and cream with cinnamon and a little brown sugar . . . relentless trial and error. Bob and Jesse eagerly sampled everything, arriving nightly with ambitious appetites, ready to evaluate my latest experiments.
I took a break one afternoon to give Betsy and Gary an update. I longed for our weekly dinners together in Vermont and thought a letter might help assuage my homesickness.
Greetings from paradise,
Thanks for the water balloons. I’m using them for a dessert we dubbed “cracked coconut.” I make a mold by rolling the bottom half of the balloon around in melted chocolate, cover it with toasted coconut, and let it harden. Then I pop the balloon and the remaining chocolate shell looks exactly like half a coconut. I fill it with coconut ice cream and surround it with Kahlúa custard sauce and another shell is propped on top, so it looks like it was just cracked open. Lots of work—sometimes I think I’ve cracked—but the end result is so much fun I couldn’t pass it up.
Today I’m trying to thicken some corn chowder without using cream. I think I’ll try pureeing some of the corn and see if it’s the right consistency. Last night we grilled local lobsters with olive oil and Cajun spices—also, grilled pineapple slices sprinkled with cinnamon. Wish you could have joined us!
My biggest problem is getting ingredients. Luckily, the French side of St. Martin has some wonderful gourmet shops, but I have trouble translating words like sesame and beets into French. I’m in pretty good shape now, but if you could send some Chinese dumpling wrappers, that would be great. Don’t forget to include a receipt for customs. Otherwise I’ll never get them out of the warehouse.
Don’t forget about us down here—keep in touch!
Love,
Mel
Bob, Jesse, and I tasted for weeks. We brushed grilled bananas with Myers’s rum, compared the virtues of regular chicken to free-range, and one night, we sampled fourteen flavors of ice cream and sorbet. We had regular discussions about how many spicy dishes we should serve, and whether or not pasta was too mundane.
Rum Punch
We tasted rum punches around the island and worked together to create the perfect mixture. Some, we agreed, were too sweet and bright red with grenadine. Others didn’t have the fresh taste we were looking for. Guava juice, we discovered, was the missing ingredient from most we tried, and freshly squeezed orange juice was a must. Still, our final recipe was simple.
Combine equal amounts of pineapple juice, guava juice, freshly squeezed orange juice, and Mt. Gay rum. Add just a dash of grenadine and another of Angostura bitters. Pour over ice and top with a sprinkle of nutmeg.
The menu evolved into a collection of foods we fancied, impossible to categorize—no simple label would describe our cuisine. This, in the weeks to come, became a sore point. “What kind of food will you serve? French? Italian?” everyone asked. I had no choice but to list everything on the menu.
Working at a table on our porch, I created a complete ingredient list of produce, meat, fish, and dairy, detailing one recipe at a time. The number of items needed was formidable. Shading my eyes from the blinding sun, I watched a barefoot man walking by carrying a machete and eating a banana. If his pace were any slower, he would have been standing still. No hurry. No stress. That man couldn’t care less about portobello mushrooms and goat cheese, I thought. Beyond him, I heard the sound of dominos slapping down on the table at the gas station. Had I been on vacation, it might be a charming neighborhood scene. Instead, it sent a wave of terror right through me. Look where we are, for God’s sake! How on earth are we going to get what we need to run this restaurant? I can’t continue running to St. Martin and paying gourmet shop prices. Shaking my head, I went back inside, plopped down on the couch, and called Bob.
“Hi. We’re sanding the floor in the bar. How’s it going there?”
I could tell he wanted to get back to the bar floor, but I needed to talk. “Bob, I’m afraid we might be in trouble. I can’t imagine where we’re going to get these ingredients. I think we might have really lost our heads this time.”
Bob assured me we’d figure it out. I told him I was going into The Valley to see what I could find, and we agreed to have lunch at Cap Juluca when I was done.
It was a magnificent day—the sky was a brilliant blue, all the windows were down in the car, and the air temperature felt neither hot nor cold. My first stop was going to be easy. Following directions to Glenford’s Dairy, I parked in front of a building that looked like it used to be Glenford’s. The painted sign on the building had faded from the sun, and the yard was empty except for a family of goats dining on scattered trash.
A man poked his head out the door. “Good morning,” I began. “My husband and I are opening a restaurant and I was hoping to get a price list—”
“Price list finish,” he interrupted.
“Well,” I said calmly, “when do you think you might have another price list?”
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
I showed him my list and he said he could special-order anything I wanted from St. Thomas. “I gonna back-check my supplier and see what he say.” But he was pretty sure it would take two to three weeks for all my special requests. Right now, though, all he had was milk.
The rest of the morning continued in the same manner. I tried all the grocery stores in search of ingredients. They actually had a few things I needed, some shredded coconut and basics, like salt and sugar, but the prices were prohibitive in small retail packages. And the meat was not even a consideration. There was no beef or lamb, and the chicken was in yellow cardboard boxes labeled GRADE C.
I went to see Joshua and Evelyn, which turned out to be my most successful stop. They had gallons of extra-virgin olive oil, canned juices for the bar, huge packages of paper towels, and a surprising number of the odds and ends on my list. I loved spending time with them, so I sat for a while and gave them an update on our progress and listened to their latest news.
“Gloria big, you know,” said Evelyn. “She makin’ a baby.”
“How many grandchildren will you have then?” I asked.
“Over forty,” she said, and began counting with her fingers in her lap. “Carroll the mechanic, he have six by his wife and four out of the marriage. Lincoln, the one at the airport, he have two. Bernice, she have two, and Vernal, he have a next one.”
Just then, two of the forty came racing out of the kitchen. Amalia and Kim-Misha were chasing each other, laughing hysterically, and interrupted Evelyn’s tally. “Them disgusting li’l childrens,” she said with undeniable affection. “Them keepin’ me full speed.”
Three generations filled her house with energy and love. She couldn’t fathom my life as an only child, visiting grandparents on occasional weekends and holidays. She hugged me with her large black arms. Joshua called out as I was leaving, “Daughter, don’t work too hard. Even the Lord rested on the seventh day.”
I stopped at the market on the way back. Envisioning cartloads of tropical fruits and vegetables, I expected to become friendly with the local women selling produce and spend time learning about things such as guava and breadfruit. Dreamland. A few robust women were surrounded by piles of boxes filled with mangoes, lemons, pineapples, squash, and potatoes. But there were no peppers, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, berries, or papayas. One woman explained their produce came by boat from Santo Domingo every two weeks and I should come back on Thursday for a better selection. If the restaurant was open now, I thought, how could I wait for produce until next Thursday?
Over lunch at Cap Juluca I recounted the morning’s events to Bob. “So basically,” I said, “I found no fish, no dairy, no meat, and no produce. Oh, actually, I did have a little luck. Joshua had olive oil and vinegar,” I added.
“Great,” he said sarcastically. “We can make salad dressings again.”
“At least this time,” I said, “we have a
view. Look where we are. This is the place for a board meeting.” We were fifty feet from the water, surrounded by tanned people in bathing suits, sitting under a Moroccan-style tent. We ordered a salad with shrimp and avocado and a grilled swordfish sandwich and wondered where the ingredients came from. Our spirited waiter, whose name tag introduced him as Wayne, was extremely accommodating when we asked about the food. He brought George, the chef, out to meet us. George was delightful—a young Anguillian eager to make great food and just as willing to share his purchasing secrets with us. “You gotta go off island for this stuff, man,” he said, so I made a list. He gave us names of suppliers in St. Martin and Miami, and we left feeling as though we had finally broken some sort of code. The puzzle was not solved, but at least the pieces were coming together.
Leaving Cap Juluca, we followed a truck haphazardly loaded with used air conditioners and cardboard boxes. Three men were in the back of the truck holding on for dear life, arms stretched wide to keep their cargo in place. A box of nails tumbled onto the road, immediately giving us a flat tire next to a salt pond. Bob and I got out of the car to change the tire.
“It’s fluffing,” I said. “It’s like a gigantic outdoor bubble bath.”
“What?” said Bob distractedly as he searched for the jack.
“It’s fluffing,” I repeated. “The pond is fluffing.” Bob looked at me like I was crazy, and while he loosened the lug nuts, I tried to figure out why all the white balls were blowing off the pond. A family of ducks swam in circles, and dozens of orange-legged birds darted in and out of the tangled roots against the shore. Large, sudsy balls were breezing past us, but Bob didn’t appreciate my jokes about being in the middle of a Caribbean snowstorm. He was hot and sweaty from changing the tire and anxious to get back to work.
Clinton and Shabby were building shelves in the coffee area when we returned and I told them about the “fluffing.”
A Trip to the Beach Page 8