Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies | ||
JANUARY 29.
I find that Bessie's black doctor is really nothing more than a professor of medicine as to this particular disease ; and I have ordered her to be sent to him in the mountains immediately.
Several gentlemen of the of the country dined with me to-day. We
Some of the fruits here are excellent, such as shaddocks, oranges, granadilloes, forbidden fruit ; and one between an orange and a lemon, called 11 the grape or cluster-fruit," appears to me quite delicious. For the vegetables I cannot say so much: yams, plantains, cocoa-poyers, yam-poys, bananas, &c., look and taste all so much alike, that I scarcely know one from the other: they are all something between bread and potatoes, not so good as either, and I am quite tired of them all. The Lima bean is aid to be more like a pea than a bean ; but whatever it be like, it appeared to me very indifferent. As to the peas themselves, nothing can be worse. The achie fruit is a kind of vegetable, which generally is fried in butter; many people, I am told, are food of it, but I could find no merit in it. The palm-tree (or abba, as it is called here) produces a long scarlet or reddish brown cone, which separates into beads, each of which contains a roasting-nut surrounded by a kind of stringy husk, which being boiled in salt and water, upon being chewed has a taste of artichoke, but the consistence is very disagreeable. The only native vegetable which I like much is the ochra, which tastes like asparagus not with quite so delicate a flavour.
fish, the variety is endless; but I think it rather consists of names than of flavour. From this, however, I must except the silk-fish and mud-fish, and above all, the
mountain-mullet, which is almost the best fish I ever tasted. All the shell-fish that I have met with as yet have been excellent; oysters have not come in my way, but I am told that they are not only poor and insipid, but frequently are so poisonous that I had better not venture upon them ; and so ends this chapter of the "Almanach des Gourmands" for Jamaica.
Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies | ||