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.
How would I describe my response to being told that Baxters Road was no longer the preferred spot in Barbados for eating fried fish? Wary is the word that leaps to mind. Nobody was claiming that the fish fryers had abandoned their positions on Baxters Road. Instead, we were being told that in recent years it had become customary for both tourists and Bajans to patronize fish fryers gathered at a fishing port called Oistins, on the south coast, and that Baxters Road had, in the meantime, become what the concierge at the hotel called "a bit rowdy." I remembered Baxters Road as being on the ragged side of raffish even in 1986. Its commercial establishments ran heavily to bars that, particularly late on a weekend evening, were patronized by Bajans in a celebratory mood.
What made me wary was that Oistins sounded suspiciously like a cleaned-up version of Baxters Road, the culinary equivalent of those tidy programs of native ceremonies that a hotel in the South Pacific might put together for Americans visiting on package tours. In any number of places at any number of times, I have resisted suggestions that I might have a more enjoyable meal in a somewhat better neighborhood. On our second night in Barbados, a Tuesday, Alice and I headed for Baxters Road.
I had to admit that it appeared somewhat the worse for wear. Several of the business establishments were shuttered. A couple of people were sleeping on the sidewalk. Although there were two conventional supermarkets, two or three other stores were arranged in a way that put both the merchandise and the salesclerk within what amounted to a cage. Enid's, to my monumental sadness, no longer existed. But even though we had arrived early in the week and early in the evening, there were four or five fish fryers in the usual spot. In fact, a couple of them had stalls that seemed much more elaborate than I remembered, and the fish was being served not in paper bags but in polystyrene containers with hinged covers, accompanied by plastic forks and paper napkins. The amenities of Baxters Road still didn't include any place to sit.
We bought some fried tuna from a stand called Sandra's and walked a few yards away to eat in the light emerging from the Pink Star, a bar that was offering liver cutters as a special that night. The tuna came with what's called in Barbados macaroni pie. It looks like traditional macaroni and cheese, served in a pale loaf that's shaped like a generous helping of lasagne, but, like Bajan fish cakes or Bajan fried fish, it's likely to be slightly spicy even before it's doused with pepper sauce. It tastes, in other words, like macaroni and cheese made by your mother on a day she had a little devilment in her, the source of which was probably not the sort of thing she would reveal to the children.
Sandra put out an acceptable version of macaroni pie—a cheering reminder of all the side dishes to come. Sandra's tuna was simply magnificent. The fish itself was moist and flavorful. The batter was thin, with no resemblance at all to what Chicken Betty used to refer to contemptuously as plaster-cast batter. From what I've read, Sandra's little secret might have included lime and pepper and chives and ginger and cloves. Fortunately, we got two plastic forks with the one order of tuna. Fried tuna! I thought of people across the United States ordering tuna in those trendy joints I think of as sleepy-time restaurants, because everything is served on a bed of something else. The waiter is informing them, in a slightly patronizing tone, that the tuna is seared and absolutely always served pink in the middle, on a bed of lentils. I felt sorry for those people, even though they presumably didn't have to eat standing up.
I had no intention of rejecting the Oistins fish fry out of hand. In fact, I was looking forward to it, particularly after a wide-ranging discussion of the fish-eating landscape with two Bajan men who had been shooting the breeze at a closed filling station in Bridgetown when we stopped to ask directions to Baxters Road. Their enthusiasm for an establishment at Oistins called the Fish Net, which actually grills rather than fries its fish, was among some strong indications I'd received that the Oistins fish feed could not be dismissed as a sanitized mock-up of the real article. We had already arranged to go on the next Friday with some friends who happened to be on the island. Although it's possible to find fish at Oistins just about every night, the operation goes into high gear on the weekends, particularly Friday nights. We were already armed not only with instructions from the filling-station kibitzers but also with a crude map of the Oistins fish stalls, provided by a friend in New York who had called the marlin at one a transformational experience.
In the days we waited for the Oistins fish fry, I began to develop an improbable craving for macaroni pie shortly after breakfast every morning—a craving that the Freudians would presumably trace to having been brought up by someone who early on ceded her macaroni and cheese responsibilities to the Kraft corporation. One morning I held out until almost eleven before I bought my first helping of macaroni pie, and found myself boasting to Alice about my willpower. Once I had my macaroni pie fix, I was usually ready for a cutter. I had flying-fish cutters everywhere from the expensive hotels on the west coast to the bars and beach restaurants on the windy and sparsely populated and breathtakingly beautiful east coast. I had stewed salt fish cutters and fish cake cutters. Given the dough content of a Bajan fish cake, a fish cake cutter could be thought of as something approaching a bread sandwich, an observation I offer without a trace of criticism.
Along the way, I tried other Bajan specialties. I had what Bajans call pudding and souse, or at least the pudding half; souse does not have the appearance of something that is obviously edible. I had breadfruit chips. I had peas and rice. I had roti. At one of the food booths at the annual Holetown Festival, I asked for cou-cou, which I remembered vaguely as a sort of cornmeal pudding, accompanied by seacat, a dish I'd never heard of and couldn't picture from the description offered in a strong Bajan accent by the person who took my order. While I was waiting for my plate of cou-cou and seacat to arrive, it began to occur to me that I might be unable to tell which was which. That turned out not to be a problem: The cou-cou was the one that had no resemblance at all to a cat. It was delicious. I passed up the seacat on humanitarian grounds.
Although oistins is indeed a fishing port, there is nothing picturesque about it. The fish market is an open building of concrete that was put up by the government. Across a busy road there are stores that amount to a strip mall. Next to the fish market, a long parking lot between the beach and the road has maybe 20 fish stalls and a couple of bars and dozens of picnic tables. The stalls have names like Dora's Fish Corner and Fay's Strictly Bajan Cooking and Taste de Rainbow and Angel's de Grill Fish Corner—the latter two not an attempt at French but a nod toward the down-home, since the sounds like de in the dialect. We arrived at around seven o'clock, but there were already hundreds of people there. Most of them appeared to be tourists; apparently, Bajans tend to show up later in the evening. At least two sound systems were blaring different songs, and some people had started to dance, in one of the bars and outside. There was, I was relieved to find, nothing at all tidy about Oistins.
The line for grilled fish at the Fish Net was already long. Alice volunteered to stand in it, another one of our group staked out a picnic table, and the rest of us split up to acquire whatever else we needed—some fish cakes for hors d'oeuvres and several bottles of Banks, the local beer, and a couple of orders of macaroni pie and some grilled marlin at the booth we figured our New York friend had been trying to indicate on his map. I also got some fried dolphin at Dora's Fish Corner, just in case. When Alice finally got served, it took three or four people to help her carry all of the fish to our table. She'd gotten marlin, dolphin, shark, tuna, and swordfish—all of it just off the grill.
The grilled fish was excellent, but once we started passing it around, the conversation sounded something like this:
"This marlin is the best," Rob said.
"I think that's the swordfish you're eating," Em said.
"No," John said, pointing at his plate. "This is the swordfish."
"That's the shark," Alice said. "The shark is great. Unless that's the marlin."
I liked it all, but I found myself returning again and again to the fried dolphin. Could it be, I asked Alice, that fried fish is simply better than grilled fish? Alice said that the frying did indeed seem to seal in the fish's moisture and flavor. That sounded right. Otherwise, I'd have to face the possibility that what I'd been yearning for all those years was not the fish but the batter.
The fried dolphin confirmed what had been dawning on me during the previous days: Fish doesn't have to be fried on Baxters Road to be spectacular. During the week leading up to our Oistins pig-out, I'd eaten excellent fried fish at a couple of church dinners and at the Holetown Festival and at a stand at Six Men's Bay, where hawkers line a narrow strip of ground between the road and the beach to sell flying fish in lots of 50 or 100. In fact, it occurred to me, since vendors on the streets of New York prepare Italian sausages and taro cakes and tacos al carbon right in front of your eyes, why not fried fish? There happens to be a substantial Bajan community in Brooklyn. On mild evenings, the cousins of Sandra and Dora and Fay could easily cross over to Manhattan—say to the strip of land between the Hudson River and the West Side Highway, in the West Village, just blocks from my house—and set up stands with names like De Flatbush Corner. I can easily imagine the scene. Alice and I are standing there, famished, illuminated by the passing headlights of the traffic. Noticing how fresh the fish looks, Alice asks one of the fish fryers which stupefyingly expensive Manhattan fish market she uses as a supplier.
"That's my little secret, dearie" the woman says.
We order fried tuna with macaroni pie and take it back to our house, where we have our own table and chairs.