Mealtime Challenges

My first major adjustments to living in a house were planning meals without access to half the foods with which I was familiar, and learning to shop in the public market.

Our staff swelled to three when Bucher hired a man to build a fishing skiff at the house. He stayed on to do carpentry and odd jobs around the house. We had known Hector at the hotel where he was a barman until being laid off for the slow summer season. He approached Bucher for a job, saying that he was a shipwright and carpenter by training. At the end of Hector’s first day, I was amazed to find that I had acquired the magazine rack I had wanted in the bookcase and that he was working on much-needed shelves for my bathroom cupboards.

My domestic experience to date had involved a family of four, one of them small and one an infant. Suddenly I was catering for seven. With no direction on my part, a two-pot system evolved. Sonia stopped her housework at 10:00 every morning and retired to the kitchen where she cut, pared, chopped, and boiled, creating great pots of food for the staff. Somehow she also managed, grudgingly I suspected, to prepare simple U.S.-style meals for us.

 

Sonia did most of my marketing, stopping at the city market early in the morning on her way to work. She knew what she wanted, from whom to buy it, and what it should cost.

Despite my first revulsion at the market, I learned to shop there when necessary. I found that the odor wasn’t quite as repugnant once I had figured out its components. It was a pungent mixture of freshly killed meat lying exposed along wooden counters in the humid heat; of quickly over-ripening, unwashed fruits and vegetables; and of dirty, dusty, trampled, stained, never-swept floors. The blend of aromas was tinged for the better by the faint, clean, salty scent of freshly caught fish.

I found some stands I liked in the market. Gracious as they were, and whether the vendors were Spanish- or Creole-speaking, I had a feeling that they were laughing at me. It was obvious that I did not know what I was doing.

My first visit was to buy eggs. I searched up and down the rows of stalls, finally found a dozen, paid for them, then waited for the squat little Spanish vendor to give them to me. Finally I made a futile sort of motion toward the eggs.

“Where you bag?” she asked.

Naturally I was empty-handed, and I hardly could fit a dozen eggs into my pocketbook. I ended up buying a paper bag, for 2 cents, in which to carry my eggs home.

Sonia had bought a large straw market bag to carry for marketing but I usually forgot to take it. The paper-bag lady always broke into a happy smile and reached for her largest sack when she saw me coming.

 

Our new neighbor Gordon Roe, as much to keep his family supplied as to supplement the family income, raised laying hens. He offered to sell us eggs. I was delighted at acquiring a steady supply of fresh eggs.

Until we started buying eggs from Gordon, I expected to find three or four rotten eggs in each dozen. We had limited our use of eggs to cooking, rather than eating them in splendor for breakfast, because, although they looked like eggs, the ones we bought in the market had almost no flavor. Gordon’s eggs not only actually tasted like eggs but the whites sat high in glorious coherence instead of flowing freely, a watery slime. Acquiring a steady supply of Gordon’s lovely, dependable “proper” eggs was joy untold.

 

Bucher and I invited Frank Richards for dinner soon after moving. His wife had returned to England to have their first baby and he was lonely. I asked Sonia to pick up lobster at the market on her way to work. To my horror, she arrived that morning without my main course, explaining that it was so expensive she refused to buy it.

“A shilling, Mum, for a tiny, little one. That’s too dear.”

I appreciated Sonia’s care about prices, even though 20 cents (us$ equivalent) for a lobster tail, instead of the usual 15 cents, still looked like an incredible bargain to me.

I went back to the market myself, but by that time the lobster had been sold. I decided to settle for king mackerel steaks. The fishmonger had about a third of a nice mackerel lying alongside another fine, complete fish. I pointed to the latter.

“May I please have three thick steaks from that fish.”

“Yes, Mum, I cut them from this fish. Plenty left,” he said, raising his knife over the cut fish.

“There isn’t enough of that fish left for steaks as thick as I want them,” I protested.

“Oh, yes, Mum, plenty fish left.”

“Fine,” I replied, adding firmly, “but I want my steaks cut from that fish.”

The man happily set about exactly what he had planned to do all the time. He sliced two steaks off his cut fish and then ran into the bony head.

“Sorry, Mum, just two,” he said, starting to weigh them.

I told him firmly that he could keep them.

“You didn’t cut them as thick as I wanted and you didn’t cut them off the right fish. Now you can get busy and do as I ask or I’ll buy my fish from someone else.”

He looked as startled as if a rabbit had attacked him, shrugged, and gave me exactly what I wanted. I felt like a successful general.

 

Soon after we arrived in Belize, while we still were living in the Fort George Hotel, Bucher began importing certain foodstuffs through ASA, the cargo airline. The hotel chef was his main customer. Some things were too expensive to import. Freight on lettuce was far more than the cost of the lettuce. Chickens were expensive, but it was worth it to the hotel to have fryers amenable to attack by tooth. Imported eggs, surprisingly, were cheaper than the local ones, even with freight charges added. Furthermore, they were reliably good.

Our imported hams were sweet and cheaper than the Belize variety. Local hams were small, dry, and smoked to hold without refrigeration in a country where most homes were equipped only with food safes. These were screened cupboards on tall legs designed to protect food from the usual assortment of household pests—rodents, roaches, and flies.

Imported beef was expensive, but it was tender and did not have the faintly spoiled flavor of cooked local beef. The hotel was happy to have it available.

After we moved into the Eyre Street house, I continued to plan meals around generous use of fish and seafood, but we were delighted to be able to spoil ourselves occasionally with imported meat. As it happened, the importing lasted only a short time for reasons I have forgotten, so I learned to cater using the foods available locally.

 

One of my first adjustments in planning menus was learning that the values of meats were exactly the opposite of the ones I had become used to during and following the war. Here, chicken and pork, including ham, were fantastically expensive. Beef was the cheapest. It wasn’t very good beef, but it was edible, which was more than could be said for the chicken. Of course, fish and lobster were the best buys. It was a joy to live where lobster not only was an economic possibility, but where it was so cheap that one couldn’t afford not to eat it.

Belize lobster was elegant. Technically it is a crayfish like the Florida “spiny lobster.” We found it sweeter and more tender than the Florida variety, though not as rich as its cousin, the Maine lobster.

We fixed it in a variety of ways, hot or cold, plain or with a sauce. Amusingly, Alex, our funny little boy who never willingly ate anything but hot dogs or peanut butter, could have eaten Lobster Mayonnaise every day…and did while we were in the hotel.

 

The first time I asked Sonia to buy a chicken it was with the happy idea that I was ordering an economical meal. It wasn’t, and the chicken she brought home was squawking as loudly as I wanted to squawk when I saw it.

I was a city girl. I was used to having my chickens arrive at my home cleaned, dismembered, and packaged in cellophane. The cackling creature in my kitchen unnerved me. Sonia tied its legs together, tossed it onto the back porch, and got on with her housework.

Somewhat later I heard Sonia and Alex walk down to the back yard, accompanied by a great squawking and flapping of wings. I gathered up daughter Carli and got very busy in my bedroom, the door tightly shut as an ineffective barrier to sound.

When we could hear Sonia and Alex in the kitchen, Carli joyously escaped from my unwanted protection to join them. She dashed back to me a few moments later shrieking, “Sonia is burning the chicken.”

Sonia had poured boiling water over the defunct bird to loosen the feathers. Neither child was the least bit upset by the entire procedure so there was no point my giving them the impression that killing chickens was not one of life’s prettier aspects. And I couldn’t help thanking my stars for Sonia. Heaven knows I never could kill and pluck a chicken.

The chicken, cooked, was no more attractive than it had been alive. It was fryer-size and plump enough. However, I never had touched anything that felt quite like that chicken before cooking. It was firm and it looked like a chicken but it was cool and unyielding like an unripe plum. I decided to boil it.

The cut-up chicken was put into imaginatively seasoned water and boiled for two hours. A long-tined fork barely would pierce it. Another hour of boiling brought to the table a well seasoned, well-smothered, thoroughly cooked, tough chicken whose cost would have provided us with several succulent lobster dinners.

 

One day before the arrival of my gas stove, Sonia bought a nice beef roast. The Coleman stove offered me only one option for cooking it. I browned the roast in hot fat, simmered it for a couple of hours, drained it, re-browned it, added cooked vegetables, made a gravy, and cooked it a little longer as a pot roast. It was delicious in flavor and unbelievably tough. Using a pressure cooker helped tenderize later beef pot roasts.

It was physically painful for me to take a beautiful sirloin tip, tenderize it overnight in the refrigerator with Adolph’s, and then cook it for three hours. However, the meat came to the table tender, and delicious to anyone who likes well-done beef. This did not include our family. We preferred our beef pleasantly pink.

 

Conch fritters were one of Sonia’s specialties. Conch meat was tenderized by pounding and by marinating in lime juice. Then the finely minced conch meat was combined with chopped onions and hot peppers in a regular fritter batter, and fried golden in lumpy patties. Carli would eat them until she burst.

 

Although we did not often serve dessert, we all adored Sonia’s coconut cream, served instead of unavailable whipped cream. She grated coconut very fine, squeezed the juice out with her hands, poured a little water over the coconut meat, and squeezed it again and again. The resulting liquid was strained carefully, then refrigerated. The thick coconut cream rose to the top, was skimmed off like cream and was spooned over desserts.

 

We settled into a pattern of meals that combined whatever American-style dishes we could manage with the abundance of the tropics.

Tropical fruits enriched breakfasts, lunches, and dinners—pineapple so delicate it could not be shipped out of the country; sweet and juicy citrus; mangoes; bananas and their larger cousins, plantains; papayas; melons of all kinds; and buttery-smooth avocados that British Hondurans ate as a breakfast fruit. In addition, there were fruits unfamiliar to us: soursop, which was made into ice cream; custard apple; mamee apple; and tiny, acrid craboo. City streets were hazardous during mango season because of the slippery skins carelessly dropped on walkways.

 

One locally produced item quickly became a favorite of the children’s—“Squash.” This was not the vegetable I had hated as a child, but a bottled sweetened concentrate of citrus juice that could be diluted with water to make a refreshing soft drink. The same product line, improved, and expanded to include lime and tangerine, as well as the original orange and grapefruit squashes, is bottled and exported today.