The Low Down on Oil Down

Eva and the Cauntay girls

Lance Aux Epines beach at dusk

Toby and her first favorite friend of the trip, David (our taxi driver)

St.George

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 In Grenada, we rented one of the sweet Lance Aux Epines cottages.  We decided it would be fun to hire our housekeeper, Eva, to make us a dinner and she suggested a local specialty called “oil down,” which the resort manager often employed her to make for the weekly barbeque.  She gave me a long list of ingredients to pick up at the Saturday market in Georgetown and the supermarket.  The list included some familiar items – chicken thighs, garlic, onion, thyme, ginger root, green beans, adult coconuts, and okra - as well as items that required further explanation - callalou (a green vegetable like spinach that we later found out is taro leaf),  “green seasoning” (comes in a bottle, like green hot sauce), bread fruit, green bananas, turmeric root, salt fish and pig tail.  Finding everything on the list was like being on a treasure hunt, but the items that seemed most exotic were actually available in large quantity.  There was a whole rack at the end of one supermarket aisle devoted to salt fish, which was laid out on Styrofoam and wrapped in Saran Wrap.  Every store we visited carried pig tail and pig snout.  At the store where we bought our tails, they were brined in a plastic 5-gallon bucket with a red lid (the snout’s neighboring bucket had a white lid) and an employee used tongs to dig through the bucket as if trying to select the choicest tails, which she dropped into a plastic bag.  The bag was then weighed before we took it to the register.

Eva spent most of the afternoon cooking.  She grated and pureed coconut in the blender to make fresh “milk,” and soaked the salt fish.  She grated the roots and cut the breadfruit.  Before leaving for the day, she explained where each ingredient was layered into the pot.  “Otherwise,” Eva explained, “someone gon complain dey didn’t get nuff salt fish.”  The kitchen smelled delicious.

At dinnertime, we dug in, scooping dumplings from the top of the pot before digging into the lower layers.  The density of the dumplings was the first clue.  Cutting through one with the edge of a fork was like cutting through a hunk of potter’s clay. An overpowering flavor of salt fish permeated every bite.  The breadfruit and bananas were dry and starchy. The other vegetables were an indistingui-shable green mush. The pigtails were the consistency of thick gel wrapped around bone and a bit of meat. We sampled every item in the pot with determination before deciding it was inedible.

Mind you, we are an open-minded bunch (Nina maybe less so) with well-traveled palates.  We felt terrible – Eva’s efforts, all that food, going to waste.  The next issue was how to get rid of the evidence without Eva knowing.  She would be emptying our cottage garbage two days later (after the New Year holiday).  Justin emptied the pot into a plastic bag and carried it to the neighboring property, a public beach access area, but there was the usual lack of garbage cans.  He ended up teetering the bag on top of the neighboring hotel’s trashcan, over flowing with New Year’s Eve champagne bottles, and sliding in through our backdoor with a sigh of remorse mixed with relief.  We could dispose of the proof, but we can never wash the oil (or salt fish) off our hands entirely.