The Spice Necklace: My Adventures in Caribbean Cooking, Eating, and Island Life

First U.S. edition

Copyright © 2009 Ann Vanderhoof

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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First published in Canada by Doubleday, 2009

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Vanderhoof, Ann, date.

The spice necklace / Ann Vanderhoof.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-618-68537-0

1. Cookery (Spices) 2. Cookery, Caribbean. I. Title.

TX819.AIV28 2010

641.3'383—dc22 2010007136

Cover design: Michaela Sullivan

Cover images: beach © Atlantide Phototravel/Corbis; nutmeg © Stapleton Collection/Corbis

eISBN 978-0-547-48843-1

v4.0918

For Rita, who taught me the pleasure of cooking,

and Harold, who taught me the pleasure of eating

And for Steve, a second helping

… LIST OF RECIPES …

STARTERS & SNACKS

Chicken Coconut Pastelillos 71

Coconut Chips 173

Colombo Almonds 378

Grenada-Style Ginger Peanuts 449

Happy Hour Blue Cheese Spread 94

Island Poppers 147

Lambi Fritters 289

Lobster Pastelillos 73

Lobster Pizza 143

Mango Chow 232

Pickled Christophene Cocktail Cubes 357

Saltfish Buljol 225

Seafood-Stuffed Cocktail Bites 286

Tostones (Twice-Fried Green Plantains) with Garlic–Cilantro Aïoli Dip 92

Wendy’s Spicy Smoked Herring Spread 315

Yaniqueques from the Village of the Big Cakes 48

DRINKS

Cocoa Tea 263

Cure for the Common Cold 119

Dandy Shandy 283

Dark and Stormy 283

Do-It-Yourself LLB (Lemon Lime Bitters) 354

Ginger Tea 430

Moonshine Punch 115

Receta’s Ginger Beer 282

Receta’s Passion Punch 337

Soursop Colada 355

MAINS

Chivo Guisado (Stewed Goat) in the Style of La Madonna 46

Creole Fish in the Style of Cas’ Anny 375

Curry Stew Chicken 205

Dingis’s Oildown 447

Geera Pork 201

Grilled Fish with Passion Fruit–Ginger Sauce 338

Leslie Ann Calliste’s Fish with Ochroes 174

Miss Pat’s Pepper Shrimp 199

Moses’ Ital Stew 427

Plantain-Crusted Chicken Fingers with Green Seasoning 230

Seared Tuna with a Cocoa Crust 259

Steve’s Creole Chatrou 402

Tassa Chicken 316

Trini-Style Curry Shrimp 234

SOUPS, SALADS & SIDES

Carnival Corn Soup 311

Coo-Coo Balls 177

Creamed Callaloo (or Spinach) with Coconut Milk 145

Island Tabbouleh 359

Mango & Pineapple Gazpacho 340

The Police Officer’s Watercress Salad 429

Rosa’s Avocado Salad 74

Starburst Salad 50

Stewed Lentils with Pumpkin 203

Watercress & Avocado Salad with Spicy Shrimp 318

SWEETS & BAKING

Boat-Friendly Pizza Dough 144

Chocolate-Crammed Christmas Cookies 284

Coconut Drops 117

Ginger Spice Cookies 19

Green Roof Inn’s Local-Chocolate Cake 261

Grenadian Banana Bread (with Chocolate, Nutmeg and Rum) 21

Icy Peanut Cream 361

One-Bite Coconut Bakes 227

One-Bite Ti Punch Tarts 380

Rugelach with an Island Twist 450

Tart and Sweet Lime Squares 75

Torments of Love 404

SPICE BLENDS, CONDIMENTS & MARINADES

Chadon Beni Sauce 314

Green Seasoning 229

Lime and Pepper Rum Marinade 172

Miss Pat’s Pepper Sauce 224

Pepper Rum 171

Poudre de Colombo (Colombo Powder) 377

Sauce Chien 379

Vanilla Sugar 401

RECIPE NOTE: Fresh island spices pack a real flavor punch. For similar results, buy spices whole when possible, and then grate or grind them yourself right before using. (And if your spices have been in the cupboard awhile, replace them with a new supply.)

PREFACE

The Spell of the Spice Necklace

A dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend. . . .

19th-century New York taste-maker Ward McAllister,

in Society as I Have Found It, 1890

THIS TIME, I bring my rolling pin to the Caribbean.

I also bring my rat, Ramón T. Ratón (made from a small coconut), and my elderly stuffed monkey, Curious George, a companion since childhood; my best pots and knives (and a proper sharpening steel); more baking pans and serving dishes; my trusty pressure cooker; two dozen tea towels; six stemmed wineglasses; three of my favorite silicone spatulas (all the same size and color); a digital kitchen scale; and one lonely electric appliance, a wand hand-blender with attachments that whisk and chop.

Of course, my husband, Steve, comes too. He calls himself my official taster and, aided by a lightning-fast metabolism, he’s an unstoppable force when it comes to food. West Indian market women adore him—setting commerce aside to chat, tucking an extra piece or two of fruit into his bag, routinely giving him big hugs hello and goodbye—and cooks can’t resist spoiling him, especially since he looks like he can use a few thousand extra calories. Inevitably, he’s the one who’s given the largest fish, the plate with the scoop of the extra something, the invitation to take a taste of whatever’s in the pot.

This is Phase Two.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

…

In the late ’90s, when Steve and I were in our mid-forties and living in Toronto, we quit our jobs—I was a magazine editor and he was a magazine art director—put our careers on hold, rented out our house, moved onto our 42-foot sailboat and sailed south to the Caribbean on a two-year midlife break. Of course, it was nowhere as straightforward as that one sentence makes it sound, and we needed a five-year plan—which stretched to seven years—to cast off the lines that held us to land.

Our new floating home was elegant, graceful, fast . . . and small, sort of like a walk-in closet with windows: only 12 feet, 3 inches across at her widest point, with most of her—from pointed bow to pinched stern—much skinnier. The U-shaped galley had a miserly 2 by 2 feet of floor space; I could reach the fridge, freezer, stove, sink and all the cupboards without moving my feet. Luckily, Steve was willing to leave the meal prep to me: two cooks squeezed in here would definitely spill the broth long before they spoiled it. No dishwasher, no microwave; actually, not a single electric appliance for two whole years.

Stowage space was at a premium, requiring a back-to-basics approach, with no duplication allowed. Every kitchen item brought aboard had to earn its keep by being used almost every day. My rolling pin didn’t make the cut, and was left behind in our storage locker. When I rolled pastry, I did it with a wine bottle. I crushed garlic without a garlic press. On the upside, my arm muscles got a workout whipping cream and beating egg whites by hand.

We called our sailboat Receta—the Spanish word for recipe—reflecting our more-than-moderate interest in food. Reinforcing the point, we named Receta’s 10-foot, 15-horsepower dinghy Snack. But despite that, we apparently left Toronto with no expectations of the food we’d encounter. In fact, we arrived in the Caribbean provisioned to the gills, somehow having overlooked that people actually ate in the islands, that we would find places to buy food there. We had crammed every spare cranny with long-lasting, North America–bought edibles, the sort of canned and packaged stuff we never ate back home: losers, like gray, waterlogged asparagus and rubbery canned chicken chunks.

Never mind. The cans languished as we became devotees of island markets, seduced by glistening fish just out of the ocean; luscious-looking, new-to-us fruits that begged to be sliced open; fragrant nosegays of herbs; bundles of fresh greens with ordinary names like spinach but an entirely different look and taste; and, especially, tables overflowing with spices—seeds, roots, stalks, barks, buds, leaves, flowers and aromatic powders. Each time we dropped anchor, we headed to shore to investigate what delicious surprises the island held in store.

And we quickly learned that food launched conversations with strangers. How do I know when this is ripe? I’d ask, hefting, say, a breadfruit. And how do you cook it for your family? Or, pointing to a bunch of mysterious leaves that looked and smelled like thyme on steroids, What do you call these? And what should I do with them? Pleased by our interest, people were invariably eager to help. And we were encouraged by their warm response.

We began poking our noses into kitchens on shore too, whenever we had tasted wonderful island cooking. And when my experiments in our own galley afterward brought less than four-star reviews from the resident food taster, we went back to those who’d helped us—and asked more questions. Food became our route into island life, and strangers turned into friends.

Far too soon, however, it was time to sail back to Toronto. Our two-year break was ending, and we needed to restart our land-based life. This was like leaving a dinner party after the first course. While we were still in Grenada preparing to point Receta north, one of our new friends issued an invitation. I want you to come for an oildown, Dingis Naryan said. She had taken us under wing when we anchored in a bay close to her home, teaching us island ways and showing me how to cook a few dishes like you born Grenadian. Food, of course, had first brought us together; we met when she caught us admiring her mango tree and gave us a bag of its fruit. Oildown is Grenada’s national dish, and it’s synonymous with party. But we can’t make an oildown until deh breadfruit on my tree are full, Dingis said. How long can you stay?

Not long enough. We had to leave with the invitation, like the breadfruit, still hanging in the air.

…

In the cool shadows of the outdoor market in Grenada’s capital, St. George’s, women sit holding long, fragrant strands of the island’s spices out to passersby. Spice necklace, spice necklace, you want a spice necklace? they call. One slender young woman, with close-cropped hair, a high-wattage smile, and an array of elaborate necklaces draped on one arm, was bolder than the rest when I paused one day to look and breathe in their scent. Introducing herself as Adonis, she said, I’ll string some special for you. What do you want on them?

Everything, of course. Nutmegs, the rough-ridged nuts hidden in polished mahogany shells under lacy scarlet corsets of mace. Spiky, pungent cloves. Slices of saffron-colored turmeric root and chunks of pale-gold ginger. Rough curls of cinnamon bark. Cocoa beans, fermented and roasted to a deep chocolate-brown. Bay leaves folded into tidy squares that give off a whiff of balsam forest. Small dark disks of tonka bean, which look like exotic beads and smell like the best vanilla. She’d fill the space between the spices with egg-shaped ivory river seeds, she said, and tubular golden beads cut from stalks of young bamboo, and tiny red-and-black jumbie seeds, which look like devilish glittering eyes (they’re sometimes called crab eyes). They’re said to ward off evil spirits—a jumbie is a spirit—and protect against spells. But they certainly didn’t help us. The entire Caribbean island chain was a spice necklace to us, and we had fallen firmly under its spell.

…

Back in Toronto, we moved off Receta and back into our old house. After two years of living on a boat, I had looked forward to having space again—and a dishwasher. But soon I discovered the house felt claustrophobic, despite the square footage. We had grown happily accustomed to living on the water under vast skies, to thinking of whatever island we anchored near as an extension of our tiny living space, to taking our chances on what the market (or our fishing lines) would yield fresh for dinner. I chafed under the supposed comfort of predictable routine, and predictable ingredients.

We hung our spice necklaces in almost every room, their sight and smell reminding us of the islands. On cold evenings, I pulled out the recipes I’d developed in my galley and put a big pot of a Caribbean curry or rice pelau on the stove. Steve, meanwhile, cranked up the heat and the music—steelpan, soca or calypso.

As the aroma and sound of the islands floated through the house, we began to plan a return to the Caribbean, to pick up where we had left off. I wanted to learn to cook not only like I was born Grenadian, but like I was born Dominican, Trinidadian, and on all the islands in between. As the West Indians say, I wanted to have sweet hand.

I’d already learned one lesson: forget the canned asparagus and chunked chicken. This time, I would use the extra space to bring along more kitchen gear. This time, our foodie bent would guide us from the start. Since spices and herbs are the heart and soul of Caribbean cooking, and the foundation of almost every dish there, we would also start with the spices. The trail would lead us to new islands, as well as back to old friends. And as we followed our taste buds farther off the beaten path, joining islanders as they gathered ingredients and set to work in their kitchens, I would jump right in and lend a hand. It’s what friends do. Besides, as one cook said to me while a crowd sat at her table awaiting lunch, You’re makin’ the soup today, darlin’. And the dumplin’s. That’s how you learn.

…

Little by little, we began making changes to the aging Receta (she had been built in 1980, by Tartan Marine) to ready her for the return trip. The galley couldn’t grow, but Steve carved new storage space for me out of unused corners, and added a pair of solar panels to supplement the power brought in by our wind generator. We had a new suit of sails cut—our mainsail had worn so thin that we could see each other through it—and the rigging replaced; and, for the times when the wind didn’t blow (or didn’t blow in the right direction), we installed a new, more powerful, engine. Mr. Engine, Sir, as I had respectfully called the ancient, hard-to-maintain beast I had so often worried about on our first trip, was deservedly retired.

Meanwhile, we were anything but—working hard to rebuild the kitty and coming perilously close to turning back into wuk jumbies, as the Trinidadians disparagingly say. I had begun to wuk for myself, writing and editing; Steve had flung himself full time into his own company, publishing guidebooks for boaters; it had started as a hobby business years earlier and had grown to the point where it was now attracting interest from buyers.

It sold in the middle of a mean Toronto winter six years after we’d returned from our first trip. By that point, even six more months seemed too long to wait. So we cheated. We put our house up for rent and our belongings into storage—minus the kitchen gear I wasn’t going to leave behind this time—and had Receta trucked to Florida. This time, we’d cast off from there.

Before we left, we hung our old spice necklaces on board to guide us.

ONE

The Nutmeg Gatherers

… GRENADA …

It’s a rampage, / The lands are savaged, / My Caribbean ruined,

Not a tree in sight, / That didn’t get hit outright;

It’s a rampage, / Ivan take we hostage . . .

See Barbados (stocking up) / Small Tobago (stocking up)

Poor Grenada, / Lord, what a plight;

After the storm, / All man in the same boat, / Yes, after the storm,

We’ve got to help each other, / (After, after)

Because livestock (blow way) / Food crop (blow way)

Nutmeg (blow way) . . .

from After the Storm, composed by

Christophe Grant, sung by Denyse Plummer

THE VILLAGE OF UNION sits about two inches south of the northern tip of Grenada on my big multi-fold government map—just above the spot where the capillary network of red roads thins out and then disappears. A few old cocoa and nutmeg estates are noted—Union Estate, Malagon Estate, Samaritan Estate—and a few lonely squares indicate buildings. But the map makes it clear this is the start of the island’s undeveloped, empty, mountainous middle.

So I shouldn’t be surprised by the road we’re walking (climbing, really), heading straight up from the village, but still it leaves me breathless, and not just from its steepness. Ahead of us, the road simply seems to end, swallowed up into lush mountains, painted thickly in a dozen shades of green. Around every bend, in every direction, is a postcard. You see that one? our old friend Dingis asks, puffing out the words as even she stops to rest. She points to the most imposing peak, where the white mist of a morning shower floats high up, encircling the green. On deh other side was where all deh nutmeg trees were.

Early in the morning, Dingis, her friend Gail, and Steve and I had set out from her house in Lower Woburn, on Grenada’s south coast, taking first one bus to St. George’s, and then another, to travel up the leeward west coast—past Gouyave, known as the island’s fishing capital, though this makes it sound much grander than it is; past Victoria, an even smaller fishing village; to Industry, where the road curves inland. Dingis keeps up an excited commentary the whole way. Her highlights are not exactly the stuff of a standard tourist spiel. Gail mother live here, she exclaims at one point, knowing Gail is too shy to tell us herself. And a little farther along, at a spot where a cliff rises up on one side of the road and plunges into the Caribbean on the other: Dis is where deh bus was hit by a falling boulder and everybody die. This is not particularly what one wants to hear while shoehorned into the backseat of an overcrowded, overheated-by-the-squash-of-many-bodies minivan of a bus that careens aggressively around each curve. (A longtime resident once gave new-to-Grenada drivers this advice about the island’s bus drivers: Give them a wide berth—if necessary, stop and let them pass. They are busy private entrepreneurs with an urgent appointment with death.) By the time we reach Union and Dingis announces, Dis is where we get off, I am woozy, soggy with sweat and more than ready to continue on foot.

The bus deposits us across from a square wooden building that has seen better days. Its wide doors are pulled open, and a car sits out front, the driver hefting sacks out of the trunk. My father used to bring our nutmegs here, Dingis says. Sure enough, this building is labeled on my map—Nutmeg Station—one of a scant handful of government processing stations still operating around the island, where farmers come to sell their harvest. Dingis leads us inside. Near the door, a newly arrived sack of nutmegs has been dumped onto a sorting table, and a lone woman slowly picks through them. But the rest of the downstairs is quiet; and when Dingis takes us upstairs, where the nutmegs are left to dry naturally under the roof, in the hottest part of a hot building, the tiers of screened drying racks are mostly empty.

Before Ivan, dey were fullll, Dingis says, drawing out the word into a melancholy musical refrain. Grenadians refer to the hurricane that near-destroyed their island in September 2004 simply as Ivan, no need to include the H word. They have fully anthropomorphized the storm that eventually became a Category 5, top-of-the-charts hurricane. Though he was still a Category 3 when he crossed Grenada, Ivan killed at least forty-one of the island’s residents, damaged or destroyed 90 percent of its buildings and uprooted close to 90 percent of its nutmeg trees. Ivan come lookin’ for his wife Janet, Dingis had told us shortly afterward, describing the disaster. He had waited a long time: Janet, the previous hurricane to strike the island, had visited almost half a century earlier.

Back in Toronto after our first trip, we had kept in touch with Dingis, sharing from afar the milestones in her life and that of her teenage daughter, Gennel. Birthdays. Christmases. Illnesses. Funerals. And then the hurricane that mash up their house, and their island. When you comin’ back? Dingis had asked at the end of every long-distance conversation.

During that first stretch in Grenada, now almost a decade ago, she had always promised to take us to deh country, as she calls the part of the island we’re now walking, where she grew up and where her father and two of her brothers still live. When we first met, her phrasing had made me laugh, since by my standards, Dingis herself lived solidly in deh country. Her Lower Woburn house was barely visible from the road behind a dense wall of tropical greenery—banana, breadfruit, mango and papaya trees; coconut palms; pigeon pea and pepper bushes. A few sheep and goats grazed on the steep hillside behind it, and a couple of clucking chickens pecked in the yard.

But now, up here, continuing on foot along the steep road from Union, I begin to understand. We pass only scattered houses, and are passed by only the very occasional car. This part of the island—more mountainous and with more rainfall than the south—has an all-pervasive greenness, a more intense lushness, and a coolness that is different from the other end. Thanks to the morning rain, the landscape seems freshly washed—glittering, even, where the sunlight splashes the still-wet foliage. We would climb up and over deh mountain, Dingis says, continuing her story as we walk, to gather deh nutmegs, three hundred pounds in a day. My father had two donkeys—we would carry sacks of nutmegs partway down until we reach deh donkeys. A nutmeg tree yields two spices. Its plump, apricot-like, yellow-orange fruit bursts open when ripe to reveal a lacy, strawberry-red corset wrapping a hard, glossy-brown shell. This delicate red lace is the spice mace; the polished shell underneath contains the nutmeg itself. When the donkeys reached their house, Dingis and her brothers would remove the mace from the nutmegs, slipping it off the shell with their fingers and sorting it into three grades, based on the size of the pieces: deh pretty, deh not so pretty and deh broken bits; three hundred to four hundred pounds of nutmegs are needed to yield a single pound of mace. (Even now, as we pass the occasional house along the road, we see various-sized pieces of mace drying on front porches, spread in wooden trays and on plastic tarps.) McDonald Ignatius Naryan, Dingis’s father—everyone but his family calls him Mr. Mac—would then deliver the nutmegs to the processing station in the village.

When Dingis had first talked about bringing us to the country, her mom was alive, but a few years ago the eighty-three-year-old suffered a fatal stroke. She pass, from deh pressure, Dingis told us in a long-distance phone call. But Mr. Mac still lives in the house where Dingis once helped with the spice harvest. Settled in a straight-backed chair, Pepsi ball cap pushed back on his head, smiling broadly at the arrival of his daughter and her friends, he looks easily a decade younger than his ninety years. Though we know Mr. Mac has had a stroke too, and has trouble getting around, it’s not obvious at first meeting. With his brown trousers rolled up at the bottom, his feet bare and his face stubbly, he still looks like the farmer he once was. He is hard to understand, but we chalk this up to our difficulty with Grenadian English—the accent and vocabulary of the island’s older generations, in particular, take some getting used to—rather than to infirmity.

Why do you think he still so strong and still look so good? his fifty-one-year-old daughter now asks us. It’s deh mountains. The bare-bones house—worn wooden floors, hot, galvanized metal roof exposed on the interior, curtains tacked across the door frames of the bedrooms, bare mattresses—has ropes strung throughout, so Mr. Mac can help himself maneuver through it. And one of Dingis’s brothers, Rovel (short for Roosevelt), lives here and helps. But otherwise, the two pieces of ragged foam that cushion one of Mr. Mac’s chairs are about the sum of his extra comforts.

Plastic chairs are pulled out for us, and Kimon, one of Mr. Mac’s great-grandsons, is sent to climb the guava tree behind the house to get us a snack. Curling, faded family photos are thumbtacked between the exposed joists of the stained aqua wall near one of the spots where Mr. Mac regularly sits, but the real art here is what’s framed by the unglazed windows: slices of tangled, jungly Rousseau-like landscape. The layered greens are punctuated with spatters of yellow, soft orange and wine red, the pods of the cocoa trees. Mr. Mac farmed cocoa in addition to nutmegs, and along the way today Dingis had picked one of the football-shaped pods. (Her eldest brother, whom we’d met briefly on our walk up the road, has taken over from their father and works the land.) Now, with the household cutlass, a wooden-handled machete with a 22-inch curving blade, she thwacks open the sunset-colored pod and offers us the beans. Local M&M’s, we’ve heard them called.

Listen to me, she says, as she always does when she wants us to pay attention to some piece of information she suspects we don’t know. You don’t bite deh bean—just suck it and spit it out.

I’d already learned the hard way: straight from the pod, cocoa beans are extremely bitter, lacking not only an appealing chocolate color but also any discernible chocolate taste. But they’re coated with a slippery, slimy white pulp that is sweet, vaguely fruity and very delicious. Once, on a hike in Trinidad that went hours longer than anyone expected, our guide found cocoa growing wild in the rain forest and kept the diabetic of the group going by having him suck the pulp from the beans; it did the trick.

Between the sugar hit from the cocoa and the one from the ripe guavas, eaten skin and all like apples, we’re ready for a hike ourselves, back into Dingis’s childhood. Young Kimon leads the way, in shorts, a new-looking basketball jersey with Michael Jordan’s number, and plastic thongs. Dingis has also donned a pair of flip-flops, changing out of the low-heeled special occasion sandals she wore (with the backs folded down under her heels) during the bus trip and walk up the road from the village. She’s dressed for the day in her usual attire: modest, below-the-knee print skirt and untucked, cap-sleeved, white blouse. Meanwhile, I’m in well-worn pants and hiking shoes, sure this is what a trip to deh country requires.

Our first stop is a spring that Dingis had told us about many times, where the water bubbles from a rock wall and is channeled within bucket reach via a scrap of plastic eavestrough laid across a bamboo pole. Make us a cup, Dingis instructs her grandnephew, and Kimon plucks an elephant ear–sized callaloo leaf that’s growing near the water. With a few deft folds of the leaf and a wrap of the stem, he turns it into a long-handled drinking cup from which we each sip cold spring water. He spots crayfish in a nearby stream—as Dingis had predicted—and captures one with his hands so we can get a closer look. (One day we will have a crayfish cook-up, she promises.) She then sends him a short distance into the forest to pick me a wild balisier, or heliconia, the giant red lobster claw of a flower that’s related to the banana and so brilliantly colored, so exotic, and so flawless it almost seems a fake.

The beauty of this land, overflowing with stuff growing, makes my heart catch—though Dingis keeps pointing out what isn’t here. Before Ivan, we could have picked grapefruits and limes, but deh trees gone now. She shakes her head, still aghast at the state of the nutmegs. To our eyes, however, there are so many nutmeg trees that it’s hard to imagine how many more there would have been before the hurricane. And the tourist board still trumpets that Grenada has more spices per square mile than any other place on the planet. Some of the trees are ready for harvesting, their ripe fruits (botanically, the pericarp) split open, revealing the glossy nutmeg with its lattice of mace (the aril) nestled inside: Deh lady in deh boat wit’ deh red petticoat, says an old Grenadian rhyme. The overwhelming smell here is of rich, fertile forest after a rain, overlaid with the barest hint of spice from the open fruits.

When Dingis was a girl, she and her brothers would beat the trees with long sticks to shake the fruits to the ground, then gather the nutmegs into large sacks. Nature has already done the work today, and the ground is littered with nutmegs tossed free of their boats but still dressed in scarlet lace. Dingis insists we scoop them up to replenish our onboard supply.

…

Mr. Mac has been growing nutmegs on this land for nearly half as long as nutmeg trees have existed on the island. There are . . . some trees which I think bear nutmegs but at present no fruit, wrote Dr. Diego Álvarez Chanca, physician to Christopher Columbus’s fleet during his second voyage to the West Indies (1493–96). I say I think because the smell and taste of the bark is like that of nutmegs. Whatever he smelled and tasted (he was on Hispaniola at the time), it was wishful thinking: nutmeg trees are only native to the Moluccas—the Spice Islands, in Indonesia—and didn’t arrive in the New World until the early years of the nineteenth century. The Dutch, who ruled the Spice Islands before that, were determined to keep their monopoly on nutmeg. To ensure the trees didn’t spread beyond lands they controlled, they washed the nutmegs in lime before shipping them so they couldn’t be propagated elsewhere. They also destroyed trees and even part of the nutmeg crop when necessary to control production and keep prices high. When the Spice Islands briefly came under British rule beginning in 1796, however, nutmeg seedlings were sent to other British colonies for planting, including St. Vincent in 1802. Grenada came later.

Around 1840, the long arm of the British Empire was further responsible for nutmeg’s spread, when successful sugar plantation managers in the British West Indies were sent to sugar plantations in the British East Indies to introduce their more efficient methods. When the Grenada-based sugarmen eventually returned home, they brought nutmegs with them. The island’s first nutmeg tree is said to have been grown from seed brought from the Banda Islands by Frank Gurney and planted, in 1843, at Belvidere Estate—less than 5 miles as the crow flies from where we’re walking.

Island lore doesn’t give a reason for Gurney’s desire for fresh nutmeg. But around the same time, Captain John Bell of the Royal Navy planted nutmeg seedlings on his Grenadian estate (which he called Penang, after his posting in Malaysia), apparently because he had become accustomed to having his rum punch with a sprinkling of the freshly grated spice on top. Steve and I can identify.

For the next two decades, nutmeg remained merely a curiosity in the Caribbean. But when a nocturnal worm took a huge bite out of the world supply of the spice in 1860, planters in Grenada jumped at the economic opportunity and started to grow nutmeg as a commercial crop. In the twentieth century, it surpassed sugar and cocoa as the island’s largest export, and Grenada became the world’s second-largest supplier (after Indonesia). Nutmeg remains so important to the Grenadian economy that deh lady in deh boat wit’ deh red petticoat is depicted on the national flag. Though the island has rebounded since Ivan, nutmeg farming will be one of the last sectors to recover fully: the shallow-rooted, easily toppled nutmeg trees were among the worst casualties of the hurricane-force winds—and new nutmeg seedlings take ten to fifteen years to bear fruit.

…

When you comin’ back? Rovel asks us repeatedly, as his sister Dingis used to. You must come and spend deh night—though the house, more than a little rustic, is unsuited to guests—and deh next morning, I take you hiking in deh mountains. Dingis conveniently sidesteps the invitation with a more immediate plan: a stop at Kimon’s house up the road to see his manicous—rough-haired, pointy-nosed, scaly-tailed, smallish, cat-sized things that are hunted (in season) for their meat.

Kimon scoops one out of a plastic barrel and sets it on the ground so we can get a good look. In the flash of an eye, one of the local mongrels lunges at it—these aren’t even Riot-Wilder pups, like the ones listed for sale in the Classified section of one of Grenada’s newspapers—and the next thing I know, the manicou is lying dead on the ground. I’m horrified—poor Kimon—and feel guilty that we’re the cause of his pet being out where the dog could get it. But Kimon doesn’t seem upset and neither, for that matter, does anyone else. A manicou is an opossum, Steve whispers to me. He’s playing dead until the danger is over.

When it’s time to leave, we catch a ride back to Union in a flatbed truck, Dingis and Gail sitting primly up front with the driver; Steve and I, sprawled in the back, clutching the sides and keeping low to avoid branches as we whip back down the mountain. I sleep most of the way on the two buses home, once again sandwiched into a rear seat. But this time, I’m surrounded on the first bus by the fumes of the local Rivers rum, thanks to the elderly Grenadian next to me, sleeping off his misspent afternoon.

Listen to me, Dingis says as we hug good night back in Lower Woburn and thank her for taking us to see where she grew up, don’t forget to put deh nutmegs to dry. You know how to tell when they’re ready? You shake them, and you can hear deh nut rattle in deh shell.

Sure enough, when I remember to check them a few weeks later, they click in my fingers like castanets. I put them in a jar carefully labeled Nutmegs from Dingis’s Family Land and tuck it into Receta’s spice cupboard.

…

By this point, we are already a year and a half into our second journey, and the spice cupboard is filled to overflowing with the herbs and spices we’ve foraged, bought and been given along the way. Each time I open its door, some package, bottle, jar, box or bag inevitably spills out. Most are labeled with more than simply the name of a spice. Like the bag of nutmegs from Dingis’s family, each has a provenance, a link to the land, a connection to a place and its people. Each wafts a scent that tells an island story.

… GINGER SPICE COOKIES …

I use Dingis’s nutmegs, plus Grenadian cloves, cinnamon and ginger (dried and fresh), to make these crisp, spicy little cookies. The white pepper adds an extra kick. Ginger’s reputation as a natural seasickness remedy gives us a good excuse to bake them regularly.