Food and cooking
Left: Dining room at the rectory, set for the team's last meal.
Many people have asked me about Haiti’s food and cuisine – what a typical meal would consist of, what fruits and vegetables were commonly available, their cooking methods, etc…I cannot speak for all of Haiti, but I can tell you about my experiences in Carcasse.
Breakfast typically consisted of spaghetti with ketchup and white bread, or a mixture of boiled breadfruit, yam and plantains. Sometimes fruits would also be served, usually bananas, but also “caimites” (star apple), “abricot” (not the apricot found in the US), and papaya during my six weeks there. Pictures and descriptions of these fruits can be found on: http://www.tntisland.com/fruits.html
Above: a typical lunch meal of rice with beans and locally-caught fish
For lunch, enormous platters of white rice or “pitimil” (millet) with a few beans or bean sauce, or sometimes cubed carrots, were served with fish with sauce, or occasionally fried chicken.
Dinner was usually lighter, consisting of lunch leftovers, or “bouillie” – a kind of sweet porridge made with flour or sweet potatoes, condensed milk, and “épices-thé” containing cinnamon and other spices (from what I could smell).
For beverages, we usually drank water, although soft drinks and beers were served when guests stayed over. Occasionally, there was a fruit juice for one day – it was pressed from the fruit in the morning and rotted within a day. This was the case with the “corossol” (sour sop) fruits from the tree on the property. Once ripe, the fruit had to be picked and juiced, which was not easy, with the cook working on it the whole morning. I didn’t get the chance to see the details of how it was being made in person, but online instructions tell you to peel it with your fingers, then remove the fibrous core and the seeds, cube it, and then blend it (or use your mortar and pestle in Haiti). Juice was also made from oranges bought from the market, which were far too acidic to eat directly (I tried – it wasn’t pleasant), and a type of sour cherry. I also had some coconut water once from coconuts picked off a nearby tree.
Above: cocoa pod from the tree, cocoa beans drying in the sun
Hot chocolate could also be made straight from cocoa from nearby trees. Since I was the only one who preferred to drink hot chocolate rather than coffee in the morning, they taught me how to make it. You start off by finely grating a ball of hard cocoa (the way cocoa is sold). You then add the powder to boiling water, and stir the boiling mixture frequently for 30 minutes. Condensed milk and spices were mixed in near the end. I don’t remember which spices were added unfortunately…they called the mix “epices-the”, and it included cinnamon, salt and sugar. After waiting for it to cool down, you ended up with a thick and grainy chocolaty concoction, saltier and spicier than a typical US hot chocolate. I say grainy because the cocoa shavings don’t totally disappear. The longer you boil it, the smoother it will be, but you can’t spend all day at it. Given how arduous this process was compared to the way I made hot chocolate in the US (milk+powder+microwave in less than 2 minutes), I decided I could live without hot chocolate. The cook did make me some a couple times as a special treat as she knew I was a big fan of it.
Above: Jack standing next to coffee tree/bush
Coffee was also served, I imagine the same fair-trade coffee that is sold at St. Mary’s.
This is what we ate on a daily basis, but there were extra dishes for special guests, such as a Haitian version of cole slaw, or goat meat, fresh from the backyard goats that had been chomping on the compost/trash pile a few hours earlier.
Above: goat in the compost/trash heap
Goat meat was considered to be quite a treat, judging from the fact that the Father reserved a goat just for the choir members to thank them for singing at the “Fete Patronale.” I had been expecting the Father’s staff to prepare the goat meat and invite the choir members over for dinner, as is the custom in the US, but things are a little different here. Instead, he gave them the whole live goat and told them to go have fun butchering it and cooking it at the school in time for dinner. It’s an interesting way of throwing a party. I can just imagine trying that out in the US – invite a dozen people to my house for a party (mostly teenagers), give them a live goat and tell them to figure out the rest. Obviously that wouldn’t work so well in our culture, but the choir members apparently had fun doing just that, and the party went on until late at night. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend it as I was too busy going over exams for all the subjects for the next day.
Although it took me a while to get used to this diet, overall the food was very good. I have a lot of admiration for, and am deeply grateful to our cook “Bem,” who was typically busy cooking and cleaning from dawn until after we ate dinner at 10 pm or later.
My only problem with the food was the lack of vegetables. Apart from the occasional tiny cubes of carrots adorning the rice, there were virtually none. Strange as this may seem, this may have been the hardest part about living in Carcasse for me. This was due to the fact that before moving to Carcasse, I was on a sugar-free, starch-free diet loaded with green vegetables, and transitioning to a diet of mostly starches (white rice, boiled plantains, etc..) was hard on my system. I also felt that many of my friends’ health problems stemmed from nutritional deficiencies. I will save the nutrition and health talk for another time, but let’s just say they ended up teasing me in good fun about how I would extol on the virtues of vegetables.
At first, I was under the impression that they didn’t buy vegetables because they were too expensive, so I wanted to see whether bean sprouts were a practical alternative. In general, bean sprouts have far more vitamins than unsprouted beans - sometimes hundreds of times more. They’re practically like vitamin pills, but much cheaper and more easily available. They didn’t know that all you needed to sprout beans was a transparent container and clean water, and told me that the beans would just rot. Some of them did sprout, and some of the people were kind enough to try them out, but I could see they weren’t crazy about the idea. The cook and one of her friends, however, refused to try any, vigorously shaking their heads no, and gasped in disbelief when I popped one into my mouth, as if I had just swallowed a live slug. I knew they didn’t trust sprouts, as they always made sure to tweak off the bean sprout tail when preparing the rice and beans – the most nutritious part of the meal. Of course, I just followed their example when helping them with the bean shelling as I didn’t want to start a pointless debate.
Above: weekly market
During my last couple weeks there, I went to the market with the express purpose of buying some vegetables. I bought two heads of cabbage, some carrots, and some kind of green leafy plant they have, which was basically the extent of vegetables there. A couple days later, the Father came back from his trip to Jeremy, and he had loaded eight heads of cabbage onto his truck just for me. Now the cabbages there are literally the size of a human head. They’re two or three times bigger than the cabbages found at home. So I had ten huge cabbage heads to eat as fast as I could before they rotted. (There was a fridge, but it was rarely used as it took up too much power). I knew I wouldn’t get much help eating them from the others, as they preferred white rice. Although one of the seminarians did agree with me that vegetables were good for your health, the other insisted that eating massive amounts of white rice was the way to go, and that he was in great health. Since the cook wasn’t fond of cooking them, I decided to solar cook them, which usually took about an hour. This leads me to my next topic: solar cooking.
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