Jamaican' me hungry

Following on from the Winter Olympics, the Winter Paralympics are currently in full swing in Sochi. In a previous post I touched on some of the controversy surrounding the Games, but let’s cast all that aside for now. Both the Games have been hugely successful for Team GB with a record number of medals being won, but for me, even that pales into irrelevance. I will never be able to think about the Winter Olympics without the cinematic classic that is Cool Runnings coming to mind, charting the true-life trials and tribulations of the Jamaican bobsleigh team as they struggle to train, qualify and compete at their first Games in Calgary, 1988.

Partly in their honour (but mainly as I’d had the tins sitting in my cupboard  for ages) I decided it was time to try out that Jamaican classic, saltfish and ackees.

First though, a little aperitif of sorts to get me in the mood. Carrot juice is, apparently, a favourite beverage in Jamaica, and spotting it in tinned form recently - not a drinks can, but an actual standard tin requiring a tin opener to get into it - it had to be tried. Unfortunately I forget to "Shake Well" before opening, as the label instructs, so have to stir it instead (as the liquid has separated out slightly). James Bond would not approve.

Carrots were my favourite vegetable when growing up, whether roasted, boiled or crunched raw as a snack, and I can remember being extremely excited when, for some reason, we had a carton of carrot juice to try on one occasion - my number one veg, in juice form! But my childish dreams were dashed on tasting it - being pure, unsweetened juice, it was no doubt healthy but very unappetising to my juvenile palate. 



By contrast, this carrot juice is sweetened, but it's a sign of how my tastes have changed that it too seems wrong on so many levels. Nowadays I quite enjoy tomato or other vegetable juices for their clean, savoury notes; the vegetal flavour is here in the background with the carrot juice, but largely masked by a sickly, cloying sweetness. This is somehow made all the worse by the viscosity of the liquid - while a thicker texture is quite enjoyable in a savoury juice, here in this horrifically sweet concoction it almost makes me want to gag. This truly is a revolting substance, and a bad start to my Jamaican meal - let's hope better things are to come.

And so to the main event - salt fish and ackees, AND (bonus tin!) calaloo, another Jamaican favourite. All three I must say are somewhat shrouded in mystery for me. I have seen packets of salt fish before, looking almost mummified in a shroud of salt (which apparently requires a good 24 hours of soaking in water to remove) but it's not something I have ever tried before. From a tin though, the fish is ready to use straight away. The label lists the ingredients as "WHITEFISH, Salt (2%)" but then elaborates on the fish by telling us that the species is Melanogrammus aeglefinus. A quick Google search reveals that this is...plain old haddock. Which makes you wonder why they don't just put 'haddock' in the ingredients list. More interestingly though, I learn that the fish was caught in the FAO 27 fishing zone, (northeastern Atlantic ocean) and the method was "Wild Caught". All I need now is to find out the fisherman's name, and I feel I will have won a piscine version of Cluedo.

On opening the tin, the fishy smell is a lot stronger than I was expecting for a white fish like haddock, but perhaps this is a result if the salting process. Having presumably already been soaked it doesn't taste overly salty, which is good. It is however incredibly dry and flaky in texture, which I am sure must again be due to the preserving method, but if you were presented this not knowing it was salt fish you would probably think it was rather overcooked. The recipe on the label suggests adding the fish to a mixture of softened onions, scotch bonnet pepper and tomatoes, so I get going on cooking up a batch of these while investigating the other tins.

Ackees are completely new to me - as far as "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" goes, I would have stuck them in the middle category, but aside from that I am pretty clueless as to what to expect. Wikipedia reveals that they are in fact the fruit of a tree native to West Africa, imported to Jamaica some time before 1778, speculating that this was "probably on a slave ship". And let's face it, everything that Wikipedia says is accurate, so this must be true... Before they are ripe, the fruits are highly toxic, containing hypoglycin A and B, which causes hypoglycaemia, known colloquially as Jamaican vomiting sickness. On ripening, the fruit is split open to reveal three large black seeds surrounded by yellow arils, looking like a somewhat unpleasant body part, and it is these arils that are cooked, eaten and considered quite a delicacy.

For a while, tinned ackess were banned in the US after some unripe fruits found their way into cans. It is perhaps the care that needs to be taken with them therefore that means that even when canned form, they are remarkably expensive. I had seen large 540g tins in my local Tesco for a whopping £4.99 a pop; my smaller 300g tin had been reduced as it was nearing its use-by date, but even so at nearly £2 is still fairly pricey. These weird-sounding fruits had better be worth it. I was fairly dubious on opening the tin therefore Are these I am confronted by what looks remarkably like creamy scrambled eggs, the pale yellow ackees having started having softened on cooking and started to break down into their briny surroundings. They still have more of a bite to them than the soft curds of scrambled egg, but otherwise you would probably believe that was what you were eating - there is a buttery, ever-so-slightly cheesy taste to them, which really is quite extraordinary when you consider it's actually a fruit.

As for calaloo - well, this is where it starts to get complicated, so do try to keep up. Sometimes spelled callaloo or kalaloo, it is a Caribbean dish, also sometimes called pepperpot, made with the leaves of any of a number of plants including amaranth, taro and xanthosoma - which themselves are often referred to as calaloo, particularly in Jamaica and Guyana. Exactly what is added to the calaloo (the leaves) to make calaloo (the dish) varies considerably between countries, but can include coconut milk, okra, crab, lobster or meat, and it is served alongside a plethora of other dishes. In Jamaica it often accompanies saltfish but is also popular at the breakfast table, alongside roasted breadfruit, boiled green bananas and dumplings, which I would imagine would easily fill you up until lunchtime or well beyond.

As a product of Jamaica, the contents of my tin is just the leaves, but the label gives a recipe to create the dish by adding them to the same mixture of vegetables as for the salt fish. I therefore decant half of my onion, peppers and tomatoes into a separate pan and add the drained contents of the tin to heat it through. The calaloo looks just like spinach, and certainly shares some of that vegetable's ferrous taste, but there is a far from subtle hint of cabbage to it as well. Whether there are many nutrients left in it after its brining and canning is hard to say, but it definitely smells and tastes like a vegetable that is doing its best to do you good, whether you like it or not.

The saltfish is broken up and added to the remaining vegetables, followed by the eggs. I mean ackees. But look - they really do look like scrambled eggs, don't they? Crazy.

Everything is mixed up together and warmed through...et voila! One big plateful of Jamaican pride. The salt fish and ackees are very tasty together, with the scotch bonnet chilli providing just the right amount of heat (one was probably enough though) behind the creamy salty fishiness. I can't quite get the thought of eggs out of my head though, which leads on to me thinking of it as a kind of Omelette Arnold Bennett that has gone spectacularly wrong, and then been served up alongside a mash-up of everything left in the vegetable drawer at the end of the week. But there is something quite comforting about it at the same time, and while this version using tins might not be the best you could eat, you can see how it might be held in high enough esteem to be considered Jamaica's national dish. It's certainly hugely preferable to that god-awful carrot juice.