Food

Provisioning in the Caribbean islands is an entirely different experience to popping into your local one-stop hypermarket at home. The larger (more tourist-filled) towns have their ‘supermarket’ but this is unlikely to stock perishables. We’ve found meat hard to come by, fish is bought direct from the fishermen as it is landed, cheeses and hams are special order items and fruit and veg is bought from street traders.

In the smaller villages there are only small bars which also stock the staples – rice, oil, a few tins of chicken sausages and corned beef, sauces and condiments, but every passer-by will try to sell you some fruit and veg they have, and it’s always “the best on the island.”

Bar / corner shop in Barouallie, St. Vincent. "Are you from Martinique...?"

 

The fruits here are recognisable to a European as we now have access to so many tropical fruits. Mangos and bananas are the best value, whilst Gala apples are always available but command a premium as they are imported. Passion fruit here is sold fresh – yellow, round and smooth. Star fruits, papaya and guava are also frequently offered. Coconuts are the reserve of barrow-men and just for a refreshing drink as you can just pick up your own from the myriad of palms. Fruit is always ripened before picking so is sold succulent and ready to eat – bad news if you want to store some on board for any longer sails. Less familiar are soursop and sorrel. The former is large bulbous and spiky thing, sod soft and squishy, with a juicy white flesh and large black seeds. Sorrel is a fleshy red flower around a nutmeg-like hard centre and is boiled up into a vivid crimson syrupy drink which tastes of Christmas spices. The children drink it diluted as a squash whilst I find it complements a rum punch divinely.

Veg stall in Bequia

Vegetables are a bit more perplexing. Potatoes and onions remain recognisable staples. Salad items such as tomatoes and small cucumbers can always be obtained, but lettuces are more elusive (and again imported). Capsicums are also premium products. Then we get onto the other veg. There are many odd things on sale here. We have been eating christophene – a pale green hard corrugated thing the size of a large avocado with a single stone. The locals boil or stir fry it. The flesh is firm even when cooked and fairly bland (like a marrow). We also had a breadfruit – the guidebook calls this the “saviour of many a traveller on a budget” but then goes on he describe how it may be boiled into something that resembles wallpaper paste, but then this may be refried. We picked one up out of the gutter and boiled it until just tender before frying it with some garlic and spices. It was fine and we will probably be eating quite a lot of it in future in curries etc so long as you don’t mind the sticky sap, which sticks like gum to your hands and then peels off unattractively. There are also numerous root vegetables beyond yams and sweet potatoes, and the ever-present plantains which are picked yellow and ripe before being sliced and fried.

Typical supermarket

Bread is also difficult to procure but everyone sells flour and yeast. James always told me how easy it is to provide bread at sea as “we made bread every other day in the Indian Ocean.” I now know that this was really translated as “Anita made bread every other day.” Anyway, my yeast phobia has proved unnecessary as making bread here is straightforward, if a little time consuming. I started with a bomb-proof recipe courtesy of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall which refers to “a good slug” rather than set measures and it works nicely. I now make the bread by putting a random amount of flour in a large bowl (anything between 500g and 800g I reckon) with two flat teaspoons of yeast, a teaspoon of sugar and “a good slug” of olive oil. I then add a random amount of warm water (but about a mugful in the end) until the mixture can form a dough. If it ends up too sticky, I just combine in more flour on the table when I knead it. The dough is worked for 15 minutes then left to rise until double its size (about an hour here). It is knocked down and re-kneaded a further three times for a really fine textured loaf (or just once more if I can’t be bothered for a more bubbly texture), formed into two loaves (or a tray of rolls and a loaf), left to prove a last time and baked in the boat oven as hot as it can manage. Sometimes it struggles to get hot enough and the white bread remains a little anaemic, but the texture is good and it keeps for a couple of days, thanks to the oil.

Milk is only available as UHT so no surprises there, but is triple the price of Tesco. This is not really so odd when you read the small print on the carton and see it has been imported from Europe! Eggs are available from the fruit sellers. Juice cartons can be found in the supermarkets, but on the smaller islands they tend to be sold as concentrate. Beer and rum are universal and the main diet seems to consist of these and sugar, leading to high rates of diabetes.

When we have eaten out, the food has been spectacularly mediocre. The fish is invariably overdone with some over-sweet table sauce applied to it, and when I tried a rare steak, it was well done over a slow heat. Matthew is almost impossible to cater for in restaurants with an ever-decreasing variety of foods he’s prepared to try (nearly all of which are not available here), so we prefer to eat aboard for now. We still have some odds and ends from England stowed away and plenty of spices, so various curries are now our staples. We plan to reach Martinique in a few days where we are promised sophisticated European cheeses and wines.