Eating Fish

Growing up in Ontario my exposure to fish was pretty limited.  Until my teens I was unable to eat seafood, I was allergic to many foods and fish was one of them.  My mother only cooked fish on Fridays, frozen perch fingers baked in the oven.  Up at the cottage she would pan-fry trout we caught in the lake, and I liked them mainly because I had helped to catch them.

Bequia is where I discovered how delicious fish can be, and once I learned how to cook it my meals improved dramatically!  You couldn’t buy fish at the store, so I kept my eyes peeled for fishing boats returning with the day’s catch.  Mac’s father Bluesy often gave me fish, when not mending sails he went out in his boat and caught barracuda.

My first fish meal on Bequia was cooked by Mac, and is was SO good!  He dredged the seasoned barracuda in flour and fried it briefly, then removed it from the pan to make a sauce.  First he sautéed onions and garlic until browned, then added a bit of mustard, a dollop of ketchup and some water. This might not sound terribly appetizing, but once the fish was put back in the pan to simmer for a while the end result was delicious.   I called it  “Fish a la Mac”.

Boileen was another favorite of mine, messy to eat but I loved it . There’s no graceful way to eat this fish soup; if properly made the small reef fish go into the pot whole, which means dealing with the heads and bones., not to mention the eyes!  It truly tastes better if made over a wood fire and consumed on the beach, where one can go in the sea afterwards to get clean.

Mac’s mother Miriam (called “Momma” by most people) was a good teacher.  I ate lunch at her house often when I was a school teacher, and once I got over my initial shyness I started asking her how she had prepared certain foods. One day I watched her stuff and fry some small fish called “Robin”.  The stuffing was farine, a meal made from ground cassava and moistened with sautéed onions and garlic.  She filled the cavities of the seasoned fish, coated them with flour and fried them. Yum!  With a squeeze of lime they were wonderful.

The fish I liked best was served to me by Adeline Wallace at the Old Fig Tree.  I had gone there with Mary and Dave for dinner one evening, and when I tasted the fish she’d prepared I was in heaven.  I asked Mrs. Wallace what kind of fish it was, and when she told me it was dolphin I nearly lost my dinner!  I had eaten a dolphin??  She hastened to assure me that it was dolphin FISH, not porpoise.  Today, most restaurants on Bequia call dolphin fish mahi-mahi or dorado to avoid that same reaction from visitors. Dolphin fish remains my favourite, closely followed by red snapper.

I no longer ate a lot of cheese and bread, something I consumed a lot of in those early days on Bequia!  Between my open invitation to have lunch by “Momma” and learning how to cook like a local, my meals had improved dramatically.