FOOD ADVENTURES OF THE TROPICS

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4329, 31 August 1937, Page 7

FOOD ADVENTURES OF THE TROPICS

To many travellers a projected trip to South and Central America or through the West Indies and Spanish Main is looked forward to as a glorilied meal of many days’ duration, for “ time to eat ” is a phase that all wanderers beneath the Southern Cross will come to love before their ship has turned northward (writes R. S. Benjamin, in the ‘ New York Times ’). Where else, except the wharves of Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and another West Indian island or two, can one stand alongside the ship’s rail and bargain with the cha cha man for a batch of fine lobsters? “A dollar for all 12? No. Make it 75 cents.”

Twelve lobsters come up the side of the ship, squirming and wriggling fiercely in the pail as if they knew that soon they would be bright red and on the plates of hungry vagabonds. One’s steward takes pleasure in transporting the lobsters to the cook, and the matter is out of the tourist’s hands until the dinner gong resounds along the sports deck. “ Mangoes! Mangoes!” The familiar cry of the fruit vendor re-echoes under the royal palms and down the narrow, mud-paved street. A little negro girl approaches, a large crate perched precariously upon her head, her arms I swinging at her sides. On the crate I are piled many of the golden yellow I fruit, shaped not unlike their North American counterpart, the pear. But pears do not taste like mangoes. If at first one does not care for the mango a second trial is likely to improve the appetite for it. Three and even four are to be had for a penny. On sugar and other plantations in the tropics the white men are divided into two schools of mango eaters. One school cuts the mango in half, peels off the skin, and then hangs on; the other carefully slices the skin in four quarters, peels it off very gently, and then digs in, sometimes with a spoon. Custard apple, which no Vermont farmer would ever recognise, is a large sphere, hard yellow on the outside, soft within. It is eaten with a spoon, and it has the characteristics of a natural custard pie. Soursop. another apple-like fruit, can be eaten or drunk. The inside contains an almost liquid substance, cool, and with a bitter sweet tang. Whoever likes sweet potatoes, whoever likes to sit down with a book and consume yellow bananas, comes upon new satisfaction. In the West Inuies or in Central America the tourist should not fail to ask for platanos, the plantain, a cross between a sweet potato and a banana. Although really of the latter family, this fine fruitvegetable becomes a delicacy when fried a bit in butter, with a sauce of melted sugar. Among unique vegetables there are the yucca and the ohristophane. Yucca is a starch plant and tastes very well when cooked like a potato. The christophane is a miniature squash, about the size of a radish. There is adventure in the tropics, even among its foods. On the small islands of the Caribbean there are supposedly hoards of buccaneer loot. Swashbucklers of the i Spanish main tumbled ashore on these 1 little islands, Tortuga, Anageda, An- I guilla, and the others, and made merry with golden rum, doubloons, and bnccan. Buccan, originally the grid on which meat or fish was roasted, is a smoked meat product which natives cook over charcoal. It was from this Caribbean method of cooking that Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd. Teach. Blackbeard, and other pirates received their names, buccaneers.