Black Gold and Callaloo February 2
In 1597, Sir Walter Raleigh came to Trinidad, exactly one century after Columbus’s third voyage, and exactly two centuries before the British Empire arrived for real. He was looking for gold in some mythical kingdom called El Dorado. Instead, he found tobacco, sugarcane, and the blackest pitch, which today forms the tarmacadam surfaces of Buckingham Palace. What he discovered was the future of oil, Texas Tea.
“But the gold is black,“ tolls VS Naipaul, expressing Raleigh’s supreme disappointment. “Only the earth is yellow, only the bush green.“ No cash, no precious metal; rather, only formidable jungle and sulfurous hell.
Had his 16th-century fleet been powered by combustion engines, the knight would have made a fortune for the crown, but no happy ending ever came of his quest for El Dorado. Raleigh’s son was killed on the Orinoco River in Guyana, his first mate shot himself on the quarter deck, and old man Walter eventually returned to England with nothing. He was executed when he got home.
The natural riches of Trinidad are largely hidden from view, much of it below the earth. There are copious petroleum and thermal and tidal reserves. Even the food we eat tends to be subterranean, shielded from flood, drought, and the harsh equatorial sun. Produce stands specialize in roots and tubers—eddo, dasheen, yam, potato, and onion—inspiring Trini cooks to seek flavor with a complex kit of aromatic spices. Otherwise, meals would taste like bland dirt, and onion.
If the starchy vegetables are under your feet, a favored meat is the foot itself—chicken, pig, oxen, yardfowl—the cheaper parts that the colonial elite would never touch, yet it forms the bread-and-butter of creole cooking. My sheltered palate is easily upset when someone, who otherwise enjoys all the good things in life, will suddenly grow orgasmic at the mention of eating an animal’s toes or bowel lining. I may stick to roots and tubers.
The most popular soup here, especially for liming festivities, may be curried corn soup, with sliced rings of cob, but the national chowder is Callaloo, a thick rooty stew of dasheen, ochres, petit pois, coco milk, and sometimes crab. Rona recommends the Callaloo sold outside the T&T Post in Carenage, so I park precariously on a slender shoulder of the waterfront, next to the Ark of Assurance Vegetable Stall, across the skinny road from a sign promising the “Future Site of Faith, Hope, and Love Centre.“ This is the very spot where Spanish ships were once stripped of their barnacles (hence, Carenage), and it also marks the landing of Raleigh’s brief seizure of Port of Spain, way back in ’97, when the world was still the pirate’s oyster and El Dorado was a real place.
Despite dropping Rona’s name, the lady working the industrial pot has no interest in small talk, neither of dasheen nor Walter Raleigh’s dead son. She shovels me a tall styrofoam cup of soup with her eyes down, reflexively adding a plastic bag of messy Chow—red Paw Paw, pickled in salt and sweet and sour, spiced with clove and ginger—sort of like a chutney for the hot curry. Then she wipes her wrinkled brow with a salty forearm and replaces the clanging lid on these earthly pleasures.