No, I do not believe it's fair to say that for the past 15 years I've thought of nothing but the fried fish I once ate on Baxters Road. That statement would be inaccurate even if you expanded it to include the chicken, also fried, that I ate on Baxters Road at around the same time. I like to think of myself as a person who can go about his daily tasks without obsessing over a juicy piece of marlin encased in dark, spicy batter. What I am willing to admit is that making Baxters Road my dinner destination for a couple of nights in a row in 1986 did have an impact on me. Whenever the subject of Caribbean vacations came up after that, I did not think of lying on a secluded beach or drinking some sort of rum concoction at a thatch-roofed bar. I thought instead of a dark and rather run-down street in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados—Baxters Road.
There I was, at the top of the street, where a dozen women, illuminated by the wood fires in the braziers in front of them, fried fish in deep iron skillets. There I was, sitting in a bar named Enid's, half a block away, where a woman named Shirley served me a plate of fried chicken that was destined to secure her a place in my fried-chicken pantheon not far from the late Chicken Betty Lucas, the great Kansas City panfryer I tried to get my old hometown to name a bridge after. There I was, watching my wife, Alice, try Baxters Road fish for the first time. She had ordered what people in other parts of the world call dorado or mahimahi, whose blunt head calls to mind the mug of an unsuccessful prizefighter. Barbadians (or Bajans, as they're called) refer to it as dolphin and fry it in steaks. She was taking a bite of the dolphin while standing right next to the woman who had just fried it and put it in a brown paper bag and handed it to us—as good a place as any to do the sampling, since there was nowhere to sit down. I later recorded that moment in a book: "Alice acknowledged that it was about the finest piece of fried fish she had ever eaten. You could hear the appreciation in her voice when she turned to the woman who had sold it to us and said, 'What are these spices?' The woman laughed. 'That's my little secret, dearie,' she said."
It would also be fair to say that my specific yearning for Baxters Road fried fish has always been more intense than my general yearning for the Caribbean. Deep into a New York winter, my thoughts do turn southward now and then. I think of Caribbean vacation destinations as belonging in roughly two categories—Actual Places and Tropical Isles. An Actual Place—Jamaica, say, or Martinique or Puerto Rico—has the characteristics of a small country, such as a multifaceted economy and a real city and authentic traffic jams. In an Actual Place, you tend to rent an air-conditioned sedan rather than an open beach buggy—the car of choice on a Tropical Isle. My problem on a Caribbean vacation, I think, is that I'm never completely confident that we've chosen the right category. In the bustle of an Actual Place, my thoughts sometimes wander to the joys of those quiet and picturesque islands where you know that absolutely nothing exciting is going to happen to you once you've settled down from the dramatic landing on a pockmarked little airstrip. But when I'm on a Tropical Isle, I think of the advantages of an Actual Place—especially at mealtime.
What you eat on a Tropical Isle in the Caribbean tends to be brought in from somewhere else, and the most creative chef might not be creative enough to overcome the extended stopover that had to be made in St. Thomas or San Juan while the waybill problem was being sorted out. An Actual Place may have a cuisine of its own. At the least, it has the capacity to grow a head of lettuce.
Barbados, the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere, is definitely an Actual Place. A lot of it resembles the unzoned outskirts of a rather large city—although there are also vast sugarcane fields and some spectacular beaches and a lot of estates inhabited in the winter by enormously rich people from England and America. It has a substantial history and a legislature of ancient vintage. Some would say that it has its own language: The island accent shades into a patois that is sometimes called Bajan, musical to the ear and rich in proverbs and sometimes difficult for a foreigner to understand. Once, at a stand at the Cheapside Market in Bridgetown, I asked about a vaguely familiar fried object next to the fish cakes, and the pleasant young woman in charge said something that sounded like "jaahm steak." As the young woman handed it to me, I asked her how it was spelled, and she began: "d-r-u…" I took a closer look. It was a drumstick.
Barbados also has a strong local specialty: fish. The flying fish—a small, silver creature found in great schools that take occasional orchestrated leaps out of the water—is essentially the icon of the country, used in mottoes and logos in the way Americans use the bald eagle. Even though a flying fish is not much larger than a sardine, Bajans customarily butterfly it. Then they fry it, and often put it in a round roll to make the sort of sandwich they call a cutter—dressed with coleslaw or salad or the mustard-based pepper sauce that Bajans are referring to when they say, "You want pepper?" (The bald eagle may be more majestic, but try making a sandwich out of it.) As the freeze clung to New York last February, I thought of flying fish. I also thought of dolphin and marlin and swordfish and tuna and kingfish. I thought of Enid's fried chicken. In my thoughts, they were sizzling in a skillet on Baxters Road. We made arrangements to go to Barbados. The Tropical Isle would have to wait.
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