Junglepixiebelize - Recollections of a Gringa Pioneer
Nancy R Koerner - Copyright@2021 - All Rights Reserved
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
"Ayuda en la Cocina"
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Boiled pig-tail? You mean, the tail of an actual pig? And cowfoot soup? From a cow's actual foot? In a soup? With hooves? Sucking the gooey yellow eyeballs out of a fish head was the “best part?” (Ay-yi- yi! I was so confused.) Coconut was a coconut, but coco was a yam. Chayote was a cho-cho, but an unknown thing with two names clarifies nothing. Cassava was the same as yuca, but it was poisonous if uncooked. (What?) Custard apple was a fruit, but it sure wasn’t an apple. Craboo sounded like Kriol for crab-apple, but I was sure that wasn’t an apple either. Maumee was a baby crying for its mother. Soursop sounded like a very grumpy person. Plantain looked like banana, but it was eaten fried. Blogos looked like bloated plantains, but were animal food. Breadfruit was neither “bread,” nor “fruit.” (Huh?) There was also breadnut and jackfruit, but by then, I’d given up. Apparently, I didn’t know my “bread,” from my “fruit,” from my “nuts.” Stupid gringa didn’t know “jack.” And these little green round fruits called waya? (pronounced “why-ah.”) Exactly. THAT was my question:"Waya" these Belizean foods so confusing?
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It wasn’t just a matter of not being able to get what I was accustomed to. These were not foods I knew; I had no frame of reference for them. Instead, I had to learn specifically what these foods were, how to cook them, and where to buy them. And it wasn’t “grocery shopping.” It was “buying provisions.”
I had come from the another planet – a world of health food stores and hippie vegetarianism. California summer provided: cherries, apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, pears, figs, grapes, and apples in the fall. Great fat blackberries grew along any road side in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We ate zero processed foods, only a pure organic diet: brown rice, steamed veggies, soy sauce, tofu, eggs, cheese, yogurt, whole-grain breads, fruits, raw veggies, alfalfa and bean sprouts, soy beans, oatmeal, cornmeal, fruit juices, honey, and nut-butters, like sesame tahini or peanut butter.
Not in Cayo. NOPE. Except for red beans and onions, Kalim Habet’s store had only processed foods: white rice, white flour, white sugar, custard powder, sweetened condensed milk, lard, salt, baking powder, and instant Nescafe coffee. (Oh yeah, and the occasional small tin of Crisco, which was referred to as “gringo lard.”) No fresh milk, no yogurt, no cheese. There was British butter in a blue tin called Wood Dunn Dairy Maid, suspiciously saying it didn’t need refrigeration. (Really? Even after opening?) There was this tiny brown jar of a salty-yeasty-paste called Marmite whose use was a mystery – and some strange bottled thingy, also from England, called Heinz Salad Cream.
And NO chocolate. OMG! There were times I would have traded my first-born for a Hershey bar. (OK, not literally, son. I love you.) The only salvation was an insipid, half-assed malted chocolate granular polvo in a green tin called Milo. Unfortunately, Milo had *zero* ability to actually dissolve in anything. So, if you were suffering the ultimate "chocolate jones,” the only remedy was to shovel a tablespoon of the dry granules directly into your mouth (taking extreme care NOT to inhale the fine dust) and then try to manifest enough salivate to swallow.
The butchery was located on upper Burns Avenue, just few doors down from Poppy Habet’s Shell Station at the bridge foot. You couldn’t call it a shop, as there was no serving counter. The building had a roof, four cement walls, cement floor with an iron grating, and two large windows, one on either side, with no screens – an open invitation for thousands of black houseflies. They swarmed over the raw wooden chopping block, slick with partially-coagulated bovine blood. No proper “cuts” of meat either, e.g. a skillfully disjointed beef carcass. Nope. The machete simply hacked wherever it landed, and every piece of meat contained jagged bone fragments and splinters. Hey, if you weren’t already a vegetarian, this made a really good argument. No thanks. The place looked like a freaking Mayan sacrifice.
I had come from the another planet – a world of health food stores and hippie vegetarianism. California summer provided: cherries, apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, pears, figs, grapes, and apples in the fall. Great fat blackberries grew along any road side in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We ate zero processed foods, only a pure organic diet: brown rice, steamed veggies, soy sauce, tofu, eggs, cheese, yogurt, whole-grain breads, fruits, raw veggies, alfalfa and bean sprouts, soy beans, oatmeal, cornmeal, fruit juices, honey, and nut-butters, like sesame tahini or peanut butter.
Not in Cayo. NOPE. Except for red beans and onions, Kalim Habet’s store had only processed foods: white rice, white flour, white sugar, custard powder, sweetened condensed milk, lard, salt, baking powder, and instant Nescafe coffee. (Oh yeah, and the occasional small tin of Crisco, which was referred to as “gringo lard.”) No fresh milk, no yogurt, no cheese. There was British butter in a blue tin called Wood Dunn Dairy Maid, suspiciously saying it didn’t need refrigeration. (Really? Even after opening?) There was this tiny brown jar of a salty-yeasty-paste called Marmite whose use was a mystery – and some strange bottled thingy, also from England, called Heinz Salad Cream.
And NO chocolate. OMG! There were times I would have traded my first-born for a Hershey bar. (OK, not literally, son. I love you.) The only salvation was an insipid, half-assed malted chocolate granular polvo in a green tin called Milo. Unfortunately, Milo had *zero* ability to actually dissolve in anything. So, if you were suffering the ultimate "chocolate jones,” the only remedy was to shovel a tablespoon of the dry granules directly into your mouth (taking extreme care NOT to inhale the fine dust) and then try to manifest enough salivate to swallow.
The butchery was located on upper Burns Avenue, just few doors down from Poppy Habet’s Shell Station at the bridge foot. You couldn’t call it a shop, as there was no serving counter. The building had a roof, four cement walls, cement floor with an iron grating, and two large windows, one on either side, with no screens – an open invitation for thousands of black houseflies. They swarmed over the raw wooden chopping block, slick with partially-coagulated bovine blood. No proper “cuts” of meat either, e.g. a skillfully disjointed beef carcass. Nope. The machete simply hacked wherever it landed, and every piece of meat contained jagged bone fragments and splinters. Hey, if you weren’t already a vegetarian, this made a really good argument. No thanks. The place looked like a freaking Mayan sacrifice.
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Torres Bakery provided plain white "pack bread," until they ran out by noon. The corn tortilla factory was on Far West Street, but it involved standing in line in the truly god-awful clanging-and-banging-clamour of the grinding-monster-conveyor-belt-machinery, and the even more god-awful fumes of whatever-kind-of-fossil-fuel powered the thing.
Nowadays the Cayo vegetable market is a huge sprawling affair covering nearly the entire savannah, with well over a hundred individual stalls. But forty-five years ago, there were only a half-dozen farmers, who stood in the shade of Kalim’s front porch on Saturday mornings. On a good day, you could count their offerings on the fingers of two hands: cabbage, tomatoes, plantains, coco, bananas, sweet peppers, yuca, chayote, okra, and eggplant. But often, there was far less variety. So you bought what they had, and said “thank you.” That’s all there was. |
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Then Dickie Simpson then gave me a beautiful mahogany bread board, and Old Teresa Green taught me how to make flour tortillas. I was already a bush-gyal. And now, with a little help from my friends, our family would not starve after all. I was on my way to becoming una cocinera belicena.