By Chris Morvan
You wouldn’t believe how excited I was to find a dripping, stinking piece of Brie in a supermarket chiller last week. But then you probably haven’t spent the last four years in countries where what you might call “good food” hardly exists.
It would be unfair to name names, and the places I’m referring to have their redeeming features, but it’s the kind of situation where it doesn’t matter how much you are prepared to spend, you can’t buy good stuff because they don’t have any.
Take the humble tomato, which could be considered either big, small or medium but all the same as regards quality. But where my wife and I were for a long, dreary time you couldn’t find a decent tomato at all: they were all dry, with none of the juicy, pulpy succulence you want running around the breakfast plate. Cut one in half and it was all cavities and no liquid.
As for wine, it was strictly low-budget Chilean or Australian Merlot, with nary a Burgundy or a Chianti in sight. Nothing wrong with Chile or Australia, I hasten to add, but these were not the sort of products they could be proud of. And it was horrendously expensive, too. The only sort that was anywhere near reasonably priced came in cartons like milk and tasted like those hard, garish fruit sweets that drag your fillings out if you’re not careful. That’s the candy, not the wine. The wine just insults your palate.
So arriving in St Maarten was like returning to civilization.
The history of the island may have been a turbulent one marked by invaders from Spain, England, France and the Netherlands, but what it has left us with is a civilized ambience that is shown most markedly in the food.
It is hard to persuade the squeamish that my rustically seeping piece of Brie is a good thing, but each to his own and there was also plenty of the less challenging Gouda, Emmental, etc. in the same chiller. And the vegetable racks were stocked with lovely, fresh salady things that make you feel less sinful just by looking at them.
And there’s meat and there’s tinned palm hearts and there’s fresh fish.
The ecologically-minded would quibble, I know, because most of this produce is flown in from the other side of the Atlantic, thereby poisoning the planet with aviation fuel exhaust, but I’m sorry, until sending food from one country to another is outlawed, I’m going to exercise my right to have fruit and vegetables that cannot be grown here.
The gastronomic sophistication in this country extends, of course, to the restaurants. Even though there are plenty of places to please the tourists who come here expecting to be able to get burgers and Coke like they do back in Cholesterville, Arizona, there are also restaurants run by proud owners and chefs and serving the sort of authentic fare you would find in a metropolis or a French village.
The things I’m saluting here are not inherently expensive or “fancy”. They’re just ingredients of the sorts of meals many of us like to eat.
There’s a place in the Simpson Bay area that does Greek cuisine on certain nights, and even though we didn’t go on one of those evenings, the snails in garlic butter and the slow-roasted lamb falling off the shank were as good as you’ll find anywhere.
Much is made where I come from of not being able to get Marmite abroad, but that’s not true. I have found it in Suriname and I’ve found it in Panama.
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Marmite is a savory spread like congealed black oil that you put in sandwiches or on toast, and it is said that you either love it or hate it. I fall into the former category. And although I have yet to find it in SXM, I’m not pining. I’ll pick up a few jars next time I go back to the UK.
On a very different note, we were glad to find that this island recognizes that liquid soap is a standard component of kitchens and bathrooms. In Panama, for instance, you can hardy find it, particularly out in the sticks, where we languished for six months drinking cartons of sickly wine while waiting for St. Maarten’s immigration process to finish grinding its interminable wheels. No señor. In the very pleasant but incredibly humid village of San Carlos, on the Pacific coast, you get bars of old-fashioned soap or nothing. The liquid variety is for wimps and posh people, apparently.
From an economic point of view, the deluge of imports in the tropics evens itself out to a certain extent; all the mangoes and guavas and bananas in the supermarkets of the UK and France are not grown there.
So don’t penalize the food lover: find a way of making jumbo jets run on used oil from McDonalds that leaves no residue, so we don’t have to feel guilty.