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.

 

More on Grenada...

at the vegetable market in St. George

lunch on Morne Rouge beach

making friends at Lance Aux Epines cottages

It was less than thirty minutes into our idyllic visit to Morne Rouge (pronounced by the locals, “Mawn Rue”) beach.  The sand was silky, the water turquoise.  From my shady spot beneath a pair of Sea Grape trees, I could hear the music in the distance before seeing the oversized catamaran headed straight for our section of the beach.  As they drew closer, I watched one man at the back of the deck who had moussed hair, a turned up shirt color, and wraparound shades adjust the bulge in his lyrca swim trunks vigorously.  They landed fifteen feet from us and tied up to a tree with a rope as thick as my arm, disgorging about four-dozen German tourists onto the beach.  Apparently, the Germans found my section of the beach as lovely as I had, because they stayed within thirty feet of their vessel for the duration of their hourlong visit, many of them settling in right next to me so I could enjoy their smoke, secondhand.  A couple of hours after the first vessel departed another one arrived.  This one, named Rhum Runner, was bright orange and parked a short distance down the beach.  Soon after their arrival, a group of Grenadians dressed formally in white shirts/blouses and black trousers/skirts arrived and marched down the beach toward the water.  Three men waded, fully-clothed, waist-deep into the water.  Two middle-aged men, one of whom was likely the congregation’s minister, held an older man by each arm and guided his head back into the water while the others looked on.  In the background floated the Rhum Runner and its bevy of pink-skinned passengers.  Perhaps the greatest inconvenience of being a tourist is being reminded of the fact that you’re not the only one.

First stop...Old San Juan

Nina cartwheeling outside El Morro/San Felipe Fort

Alex, Arwen, Rachel, Nina and Toby

 

We arrived in San Juan Christmas Eve at around 9p.m..  Stepping out of the airport into the humid air was delicious.  The highways leading from the airport to our hostel were as well-maintained as any roads you would drive on the mainland U.S. and edged in manicured landscape of lawn and palm trees.  Posado San Francisco, in one of Old San Juan’s oldest buildings, was the girls’ first hostel experience.  Because we had two rooms with double beds at either end of a hallway, I bunked with Toby and Justin with Nina.  Being Toby’s bedmate was sweet.  She would scootch over to me in the night and snuggle up, then lie quietly in the morning until I woke up, at which time she would kiss me on the lips over and over.  The hostel itself was clean and ideally-located, if a little dismal. 

The next day, having celebrated a Cauntay Christmas on December 22, I kept commenting, sincerely, “what’s the deal with all the Christmas stuff?  Christmas is over.”  (It had been remarkably easy to designate a random day for celebration and actually feel it was authentic.)  There were Christmas lights wrapped around trees and statues in the town squares, carolers and musicians parading through the streets.  We even saw a man on a motorcycle covered from hat to wheel-well in multi-colored lights.

We met up with Arwen, a colleague of Justin from his days doing massage in Rockridge, and her husband, Alex, who had traveled from New Orleans to vacation.  The architecture and colors of Old San Juan were lovely, as was wandering the city with Nina, our arms around each other.  The old city was completely surrounded by stone walls, forts and sprawling lawns (which prevented attacks by marauders but made for ample cartwheeling space) with stunning views over the ocean.  Toby rode Alex’s shoulders as much as possible. 

By the time we left the city for Grenada after two full days, I was ready to leave behind the hot, grimy, city where it was difficult to make any progress down sidewalks overrun by cruise-ship-tourists.  Justin and I were exhausted from travel and sightseeing and sitting in restaurants for long meals with our kids (south of Florida, an hour and a half minimum from the time you sit down to the time you manage to get someone to bring you a check).  Boarding our plane to Grenada was when our real adventure felt like it had begun.