JANUARY 29.
I find that Bessie’s black doctor is really nothing more than a professor of medicine as to this particular disease; and I have ordered her to be sent to him in the mountains immediately. Several gentlemen of the county dined with me to-day, and when they left me, one of the carriages contrived to get overturned, and the right shoulder of one of the gentlemen was dislocated. Luckily, it happened close to the house; and as the physician who attends my estate had dined with me also, a boy, on a mule, was despatched after him with all haste. He was soon with us, the bone was replaced with perfect ease, and this morning the patient left me with every prospect of finding no bad effects whatever from his accident.
We had at dinner a land tortoise and a barbecued pig, two of the best and richest dishes that I ever tasted;—the latter, in particular—which was dressed in the true maroon fashion, being placed on a barbecue (a frame of wicker-work, through whose interstices the steam can ascend), filled with peppers and spices of the highest flavour, wrapt in plantain leaves, and then buried in a hole filled with hot stones, by whose vapour it is baked, no particle of the juice being thus suffered to evaporate. I have eaten several other good Jamaica dishes, but none so excellent as this, a large portion of which was transferred to the most infirm patients in the hospital. Perhaps an English physician would have felt every hair of his wig bristle upon his head with astonishment, at hearing me ask, this morning, a woman in a fever, how her bark and her barbe cued pig had agreed with her. But, with negroes, I find that feeding the sick upon stewed fish and pork, highly seasoned, produces the very best effects possible.
Some of the fruits here are excellent, such as shaddocks, oranges, granadelloes, forbidden fruit; and one between an orange and a lemon, called “the grape or cluster fruit,” appears to me quite delicious. For the vegetables, I cannot say so much, yams, plantains, cocoa poyers, yam-poys, bananas, &c. look and taste all so much alike, that I scarcely know one from the other: they are all something between bread and potatoes, not so good as either, and I am quite tired of them all. The Lima Bean is said to be more like a pea than a bean, but whatever it be like, it appeared to me very indifferent. As to peas themselves, nothing can be worse. The achie fruit is a kind of vegetable, which generally is fried in butter; many people, I am told, are fond of it, but I could find no merit in it. The palm-tree (or abba, as it is called here) produces a long scarlet or reddish brown cone, which separates into beads, each of which contains a roasting nut surrounded by a kind of stringy husk—which, being boiled in salt and water, upon being chewn has a taste of artichoke, but the consistence is very disagreeable. The only native vegetable, which I like much, is the ochra, which tastes like asparagus, though not with quite so delicate a flavour.
As to fish, the variety is endless; but I think it rather consists in variety of names than of flavour. From this, however, I must except the Silk-Fish and Mud-Fish, and above all, the Mountain-Mullet, which is almost the best fish that I ever tasted. All the shell-fish, that I have met with as yet, have been excellent; the oysters have not come, in my way, but I am told that they are not only poor and insipid, but frequently are so poisonous that I had better not venture upon them; and so ends this chapter of the “Almanach des Gourmands” for Jamaica.