A Buccaneering Dinner

This hiatus has been longer than planned because I had a busy week, but this weekend I had the opportunity to cook with my girlfriend and one thing we did was try out more recipes for my buccaneer cookbook project. The idea was to produce a meal from a few basic ingredients that would reflect both the technical limitations and the wealth of natural resources European settlers encounbtered in the early Caribbean colonies. The result was very pleasant.

The centrepiece was albacore tuna, a fish that is mentioned approvingly in several descriptions. The preferred method of preparation, according to Jacques de Lery, was salting and roasting it, and many other accounts describe that most fish was cooked like this. Fish is quite expensive these days, so we were limited to small portions. Surely men who caught their own would have more. We roasted it in the oven and it was very good, even without the sauce Allemande de Lery would have liked with it (I am still not sure what that would have been, but surely not what we know by that name today).

To accompany the albacore, we opted for plantain. Though not native to the Americas, this fruit is mentioned even in late 16th century accounts as being grown by Native American coastal communities who traded it to European sailors. The fruit was very popular and cookerd in a variety of ways, including roasted in the shell, as Jean-Baptiste Labat describes, or without as William Dampier describes. We shelled one and cut it into wedges that we then cooked at 200°C in an air frier (no fire was on hand) and left the other in its shell to roast with the fish in the oven. The wedges were pleasant enough, a bit like oven-baked potatoes, but the roasted plantain was a very positive surprise. The shell turned entirely black and burst, exposing the yellow flesh. It was soft, but not mushy, and not as dry as the pieces. I could absolutely see how this was popular with “hunters, boucaniers, and fishermen”, as Labat writes.

Finally, we added sauces which apparently were commonly eaten. One was the obiuquitous pimentade sauce, in this iteration consisting merely of oil, chili pepper, and lemon juice, based on the account of Exquemelin. Apparently in some cases it was made with only citrus juice and chilis, which would be even more basic. The other is avocado sauce that is admittedly only described by Dampier. He mentions mashing it with lemon juice and sugar, and I made this in a rather sweet version before. this time, we tried to have the lemon predominate and that resulted in a sour, refreshing, and quite tangy mash. The version that Dampier specifically mentions as eaten with plantains had only salt, but since Labat states that avocado should be eaten with salt and pepper, we went with the added flavour boost. It was good, though I preferred the lemony version.

All of it went together well and fed two people very felicitously. Now it is imperative I actually finish that damned manuscript, so unfortunately I will likely be reducing the number of posts in the foreseeable future to concentrate on that. I will be back fully at some point, but right now, I need that thing off my desk and, hopefully, eventually in print.