Barbados by Stomach

I love food tours. I try to schedule one everywhere we go, and so far we’ve toured Venice, Paris, and Bordeaux via our appetites. At Christmas we added Barbados to the list. LickRish Food Tours has a walking tour of Bridgetown, the bustling Capital of Barbados, which included a great deal of history, local market access and a step away from the tourist areas of this thriving city. We were vacationing with our friends Teresa and Pablo, who joined us for the tour.

Our guide, Paulette, a native Barbadian with an infectious smile, met us at the statue of Errol Barrow, the first prime minister of the island. Barbados has been independent since 1966, and has a robust social safety net, with national health insurance, social security and free education including college. Our brief history lesson included the list of crops planted on the island by the British shortly after they claimed Barbados in 1625. Sugar cane, yams, cassava, plantain, cotton and tobacco were introduced, and most of the food crops can still be found on Barbados today, although hand cutting of sugar cane is no longer their harvesting technique. But there are rum distilleries on the island putting that sugar cane to good use; Mount Gay and St. Nicholas Abbey.

The high starch, high sugar diet is still common in Barbados, and they love their pork as well, so add high fat to the list. Unfortunately this diet leads many on Barbados to develop obesity and diabetes, and Barbados has one of the highest amputee rates in the world. Paulette admitted that was why she exercised regularly and kept herself slim; her people’s health crisis would not become her own.

We got to experience some of the dishes that would fuel that epidemic, and as it was the week before Christmas learned more about holiday meals on this tropical island. As the most British of the Caribbean Islands, the Christmas turkey is a regular on the dinner table for the holiday, along with ham AND pork. We heard this from several people when we inquired about their holiday plans. And they start cooking late on Christmas Eve and cook all night. I’m guessing possibly because the weather was in the 80-85 degree range; it was at least a bit cooler at night. And on Boxing Day, December 26^th, we returned to a beach we’d liked and the food purveyor there had saved us some of her special Christmas rum cake. It was like eating a solid slice of rum, moist and molasses-ey, but I wouldn’t get behind the wheel of a car anytime soon after eating it.

Our food tour started at the Waterfront Café, where our first dish was Pot Soup. This was explained as a typical Bajan dish made from whatever was in the refrigerator that needed to be used up, plus added dumplings. I told them at home we called that The Week In Review.

Our next stop was Tim’s, a second floor eatery we’d never have even noticed. It was filled with locals and overlooked the busy main street. Here the group experienced souse, a pickled pork dish, which tasted like a smoked shoulder but was fattier and bonier. It wasn’t highly rated by the attendees, but the breadfruit, cassava, and sweet potato pudding served with it were quite tasty.

A walk to the central market lead us to a food stall where a vendor treated us to the Christmas drink, boiled sorrel flowers flavored with cloves, bay leaves and other spices as well as a healthy dose of sugar. It was delicious, and tasted like Christmas! But my favorite dish that day was a treat called conkie. It’s made once a year for Independence Day. This fruitcake like pudding is steamed in a banana leaf. I asked the vendor what was in it, and he replied, “A mixture of coconut, sweet potato, pumpkin, corn meal, raisins, sugar, spices and love.”

Next came two bakeries where we tasted currant slices, a raisin filled pastry, and meat rolls, a mixed meat pastry that was deep fried and delicious.

Not done yet we then ventured to Mustor’s Bar and Restaurant, a Bridgetown institution, where we sampled an “appetite opener”, a drink called mauby, made from tree bark. Certainly an acquired taste. It starts out sweet, almost like root beer, and then turns bitter. It’s supposed health benefits are that it is good for arthritis, reduces cholesterol, treats diarrhea and may help fight diabetes. When combined with coconut milk it may lower blood pressure, according to studies carried out at various universities. Who knew?

At Mustor’s we also had the ubiquitous peas and rice (actually pigeon peas, a bean) and a very tender beef short rib. And very sweet lemonade.

Our last stop, thankfully, as we were stuffed to the gills by this point, was the Agapey Chocolate Factory, where their chocolate bars and ice cream were in abundance. They sell single origin dark chocolate bars using cacao from various islands, with some interesting flavorings, as well as rum ice cream, or my choice – mango! I’m so used to low fat ice cream that this was almost too much. In fact, Steve had to finish it for me.

The route Paulette took us allowed us to experience lesser-known areas, and we were happy to see Christmas shoppers in regular stores, although Christmas decorations in a tropical setting did seem quite out of place.

As food tours went I’d rate it a 6.5 out of 10. My biggest complaint was that some of the purveyors we visited had run out of what Paulette had brought us to taste so she needed to substitute, and we missed out on one dish entirely, the Bajan fish cake, because of timing. Not all her fault, as a cruise ship’s late arrival delayed 4 tour members from a timely meet up, but it seemed some advance communication with the various food vendors could have rectified many of the issues.

I did feel lucky we tasted the Christmas drink and Independence Day pudding. We experienced first hand the starch, sugar and fat trifecta of the Barbados diet. We looked forward to our return to eating a bit more healthfully, taking advantage of all the fresh fish and vegetables the island also has to offer, which were totally negated by the quantities of rum punch we drank while we were there.

Happy New Year!