A Moveable Feast (6 page)

The sun was setting as the women walked us to the car. We clasped hands again, and Deb and I were effusive in our thanks for the day. Tamou and her granddaughters had never met an American or Canadian before, but the warm efficiency with which they had welcomed us into their home had made it seem like drop-in visits such as ours happen all the time. When Tamou gave me a fierce hug, I was saddened to know we’d not meet again. Long shadows followed our tumble down the mountain to the highway.

In city kitchens, Deb and I had experienced a richly spiced cuisine of complex flavours and elaborate meals elegantly presented. We had been introduced to exotic and intriguing food combinations. There was none of that with Tamou. She provided us with a glimpse into her rural food culture, its modest flavours and unpretentious hospitality. As our day together unfolded, Tamou’s fun-loving nature and generosity of spirit shone through the mantle of her discipline.

I admired this resourceful woman who had prepared a meal for unannounced strangers, transforming the ingredients they brought into a Friday feast – and making it look effortless. She and her granddaughters cooked food in the way they knew, and served it with pride.

Minor discomforts were trumped by wonder as I watched Team Tamou in action. The day opened my heart to that part of a culture’s cuisine that lies beyond the taste and presentation of food. I had entered Moroccan home kitchens in search of culinary secrets and insider cooking tips. In Tamou’s company, these taste-centric expectations were replaced by a broadened appreciation of homely hospitality.

Women in Morocco inspired me to cook with greater confidence, to put away my measuring cups and trust my intuition. Tamou’s example taught me something more substantial. I began to worry less about perfecting a dish, or setting my own table with picture-book elegance. I started to pay more attention to meal-time camaraderie and to feel more generosity towards strangers. Even now, when I pull a paring knife from the drawer, my heart warms at the memory of a remarkable woman celebrating the day we shared with a well-placed lick of her hand and forearm.

William Sertl was the travel editor of
Gourmet
for ten years, having started at the magazine the same year that Ruth Reichl took over, in 1999. The position combined his two great passions – food and travel – and he worked with a team of editors that, he says, ‘ended up being more like family than colleagues. We certainly agreed on one thing: the first order of business after getting off a plane was figuring out where to eat.’ Prior to
Gourmet,
Bill was one of the founding editors of
Saveur
(as well as the travel editor of
Garden Design
), and worked for that magazine from its inception in 1993. From 1986 until 1993, he was articles editor of
Travel & Leisure
. Bill was born and raised in St Louis.

It took me thirty years as a travel editor – best job in the world, everyone said – to realise how much distaste I had for vacations. Not travel. Vacations. So I might not have been the best person to write a magazine article about Mustique, a private Caribbean island in the chain of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Luxury villas for rent on Mustique came staffed with enough servants to
ensure that you, the master of the house for a week or two, had absolutely nothing to do except loaf on the beach or sip cocktails made by someone else while waiting until dinner was ready.

I have never cared much about landing at JFK with a tan. I like to come home smarter than I was before I left. Speaking a little better Spanish. Understanding a little more clearly how Parisians manage to look so chic, even when taking out the trash. Bearing a new recipe – always a recipe, for food is the key to culture, the easiest way into a relationship with folks you’ve yet to meet.

But Mustique, where everyone speaks English and where having servants is the very idea of the place, happened to be the assignment at hand. I had to make the best of it, so I came up with a plan. Among the staff at Sapphire, my five-room manse overlooking the sea, which so far I had seen only in a brochure, would be a cook. I would befriend that cook and break down the barrier that put her in a white uniform and me in shorts and a T-shirt. I would hang out with her. She would teach me to cook, to cook Caribbean.

The dinner bell told a different story.

I arrived at Sapphire in one of the ubiquitous Kawasaki Mules – a motorised vehicle that’s bigger than a golf cart but not as sturdy as a Jeep – that every renter on the island is given after landing at the airport. My ‘staff’ were dutifully lined up, waiting to greet me as I drove past the gates: two gardeners, with whom I would have very little to do during my week’s stay, busy as they were puttering around the lavish grounds; two maids – Pearl and Pat – both of whom would become pals, at least for a week; and Donna Jacobs, who ended up a friend.

It’s hard to settle into a villa meant for parties of six, seven, eight or more when you’re only one person. It’s difficult to relax.
I broke the ice with the worst kind of small talk, mentioning to Pearl, the matriarch of the group, that it had been raining on Barbados when we changed planes. ‘Did it rain here?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘the rain, it came down.’ Ah, that lovely, lilting Caribbean way of phrasing. Islanders always seem to add a dash of sunshine to their speech, making English sound almost musical – no mean feat for what is not the most melodious language on the planet. I was starting to melt. Could the ice be far behind?

I took my seat in the formal dining room, so beautiful and shimmering in candlelight but also open to the breezes swirling through the house. The room was off a central courtyard filled with exotic plants and trees, where birds and butterflies swooped and soared with no regard for manmade boundaries. The warm moist air turned the rambling house sultry, a tropical Wuthering Heights above the sea, open to nature’s seduction.

‘Here is the bell, to ring when you want your next course,’ Pat told me, attempting to hand over a dainty little glass ornament that would have looked more at home in a Park Avenue dining room than on a sunny Caribbean estate. At first, I laughed, without meaning to. Then I baulked, and stood up, pushed my chair under the table and marched directly into the uncharted territory of the kitchen.

Donna was stirring the contents of a pot on the stove. I approached, picked up the lid, and said, ‘What’s for dinner?’

Donna was a good cook – no question about that. It might be more accurate to say she was a good chef, for the menu of vegetable ravioli in a roux with herbs, followed by seared tuna with wasabi mayo, topped off with a blue cheese and cheddar soufflé – so exquisitely executed and full of flavour it could have been
served at the finest French restaurant – gave few insights into anybody’s local cuisine. This was high-end vacation fare, something you’d expect at a fancy dining room in just about any big city on earth. I suddenly wanted to know: where did you learn to cook like that? When did you realise you liked to cook? When can I come into your world and step out of the role I am supposed to play?

The answers came quickly. The owner of this villa, Brian Alexander, had only recently retired after thirty years as the managing director of the Mustique Company, the association of owners that rents all the 110-plus villas on the island. Mementos, hanging on walls and casually propped up on tables in hidden corners of the house, spoke of Sapphire’s noble history. Nothing was more revealing than a small, faded photo of Alexander greeting a young Princess Margaret dockside upon her arrival on the island, with her sister the Queen and brother-in-law Prince Phillip.

In his managerial position, Alexander entertained a lot. He wanted a good cook and was willing to sponsor Donna for training with New York’s French Culinary Institute when it came to Mustique to run a special program. He needed sophisticated cuisine to reflect the worldly crowd he catered to. He needed a dinner bell.

Mustique made even more sense to me when I discovered that the island had been purchased in the late 1950s by a Scottish aristocrat as a private playpen for himself and privileged friends like Margaret.

Donna immediately got that I wanted to hang with her in the kitchen. I was curious about every menu she had mapped out for the week, especially one dish – sushi – that was coming up in a few days. (Sushi? Why not, I thought, with fish this fresh?) Donna wasn’t shy about filling me in on her culinary prowess, and I was more than happy to hear how she had always wanted to learn to cook.

There aren’t a lot of options for work on a small Caribbean island, where most employees come from the mother island of St
Vincent – larger, yes, but not exactly brimming with opportunities itself. I began to notice the men sweeping the roads and beaches all over the island. So many of them stood and stared as they slowly brushed yet another leaf or scrap of paper out of the way, as if even the tiniest piece of litter might make someone recoil in horror. They were fully employed and yet not doing much of anything at all. Donna, as well as Pearl and Pat, lived on the grounds of my tidy beach castle and might have found a better way. Donna, especially, had a job that was creative and clearly satisfying to her.

As the week went on, lifting pot lids became the major activity in the afternoon, when preparing the evening meal got under way at around five. Donna didn’t hesitate to ask for my help. Once I had crossed that threshold into her culinary domain, I became her new sous chef, or maybe just a heaven-sent helper to do the slicing and dicing. ‘You cut these, please,’ Donna would say, handing over a few red capsicums for a Chinese concoction she was planning that evening. Fair enough, I thought; it’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to lift pot lids at will. Pearl and Pat looked vaguely shocked as Donna and I became increasingly more familiar. But maybe they also knew that Donna took no prisoners, for I was beginning to feel more and more like an appliance.

I had my own way of paying back. Teasing Donna was easy for me, especially since I had a reliable two-woman audience to count on for applause. A simple question, thrown out in jest but laced with mock gravitas – ‘Are you sure you want so many onions in the stir-fry? It might overwhelm the dish’ – was guaranteed to get a rise. Donna’s you’re-a-dead-man expression as she whipped her head around from the stove was as predictable as a Swiss clock.

But I craved more than just an afternoon play date. I wanted to find out where all the fabulous food came from.

‘Will you take me to the market with you? And to the fish store before you make sushi?’ I asked on that first day. ‘We’ll see,’ Donna said.

After breakfast on the second morning, without a word of warning, Donna appeared on the deck and announced, ‘We go now.’

‘Go where?’ I asked

‘To the fish market,’ she said. So off we went to the little green ‘shack’ at the water’s edge on the other side of the island. Donna had promised lobster that night, and already the boats, in all shades of Crayola colours, were pulling up on the beach. I marvelled as men held up great clawed creatures, just pulled from the Caribbean. Donna talked with them in a dialect so fast, furious and foreign that I couldn’t find an English word to save me, although I knew they were hidden in the conversation. Would I have walked up to these guys and struck up a conversation had she not been with me? Not on your life; I would have felt like a number one fool. Donna was my key into their world, giving me a kind of VIP status that money alone couldn’t buy.

The guy who owned the fish market, really more of a store that acted as a clearing house, had ‘proud’ written all over his handsome, youthful face. His small green hut was a bit deceptive, for inside it was all spit and polish, with trays of whole fish on ice fronting a long sink used for cutting each one up to a customer’s specifications. The storage refrigerator was top of the line. On the wall to one side was an Obama sticker. It was mid-January, and our president was about to be inaugurated. I felt a swell of pride that he was being honoured on this small volcanic chunk of land closer to South America than to the United States.

A few European tourists had ventured in to inspect the catch of the day. I felt infinitely superior to them as they poked and sniffed around before settling on a few fillets that were quickly wrapped before they scooted out the door. I was still chatting with the store’s
owner, still oohing and aahing as more fish came in. After Donna and I picked out our lobster, she took a picture of me next to the man who had caught it, holding it high as we both beamed while trying to say ‘cheese’, as Donna had commanded.

We were ‘downtown’ now, which meant that we had to pay a visit to the two other great establishments across from the fish store: the fruit man and the grocery store. The fruit man sat next to his stand on a chair that was slightly tilted for maximum comfort. His hat was halfway down his head. Except for the fact that his table was crammed with exotic specimens in a riot of colours, he struck me as the Universal Fruit Man, for his counterpart was everywhere in New York – indeed, throughout the world. It made me think that all sidewalk vendors must attend a school somewhere to learn how to sit at just the right angle, with their hats perfectly cocked, while mastering the art of the blank expression.

Across the street, something even more familiar loomed: the grocery store. While it had its Caribbean touches, I felt as if I’d been to this place many times in the course of my life. How different can a store be when its shelves are stacked with mostly familiar items? And here I was for the first time surrounded by fellow whites, who were speaking English, yes, but also German, French and Italian. My cultural focus had shifted, but all it did was make me feel cooler than I had before. ‘I’m with Donna, folks,’ I was thinking, ‘so best not to get in our way.’

On a return trip to Mustique – 21 January, to be exact – I bought a local St Vincent newspaper with ‘OBAMA’ splashed across the front page. I also took a photo of an adorable little blond boy who was sitting on the checkout counter in a sea of his mother’s groceries. Suddenly, I was being reprimanded. His mother suggested, in a staccato accent, that perhaps this wasn’t a good idea. ‘People are on Mustique for privacy,’ she said. ‘There are many celebrities.’