University of Virginia Library

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

had at dinner a land-tortoise and a barbecued pig, two of the best and richest dishes that I ever tasted, the latter, in particular, it was dressed in the true maroon fashion, being placed on a barbecue (a frame of wicker-work, through whose interstices the steam can ascend), filled with peppers and spices of the highest flavour, wrapped in plantain leaves, and then buried in a hole filled with hot stones, by whose vapour it is baked, no particle of the juice being thus suffered to evaporate. I have eaten several other good Jamaica dishes, but none so excellent as this, a large portion of which was transferred to the most infirm patients in the hospital. Perhaps an English physician would have felt every hair of his wig bristle upon his head with astonishment at bearing me this morning ask a woman in a fever, bow her bark and her barbecued pig had agreed with her. But with negroes, I find that feeding the sick upon stewed fish and pork, highly seasoned, produces the very best effects possible.

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.