Home Cooking

Another day of excursions with Liz. First off to Junction, the nearest big town to run errands. It's hot and sunny and bright in Treasure Beach when we leave but ten minutes later when we drive up into the hills, there's a cool, wet fog blanketing the landscape and blotting out the usual view of shimmering blue sky and blue sea. What a strange sensation to be sweltering in the tropics in one minute and then in a few short miles to be transported to a Jamaican version of the English countryside.

Back in Treasure Beach and the heat, we head off the the home of Don Don and Miss Dell who live surrounded by farmland in the hills above the sea. I love the colors of the landscape up here--a bright blue sky arches over the deep red earth and in between is every shade of green.

Miss Dell, a cheerful, plump woman with delightfully round cheeks, has insisted on cooking me a batch of bammy to bring back with me to the states. Bammy is a kind of pancake made from cassava flour that is customarily served here with fish. And St. Elizabeth, the parish in which Treasure Beach is located, is known for the excellence of its bammy, made the traditional, incredibly labor intensive way. So we stand in Miss Dell's hot kitchen while she explains the multi-step process of making bammy--digging up the cassava, a highly nutritious root vegetable ubiquitous here, grating it by hand, placing it in a special basket to squeeze out all the liquid and then sifting out all the lumps with a reed sieve. I am daunted by the amount of time, energy and brute strength it takes to transform cassava into flour but this is clearly a labor of love for Miss Dell, a gift to her large family.

The final step is for Miss Dell to heat a flat iron pan on the stove, sprinkle a few handfuls of cassava within a circular iron mold and then pat it and smooth it with a special wooden paddle. The pancake is flipped and browned on the other side and then it is ready to be eaten, piping hot and redolent of the cassava. Truthfully, I am not a big fan of the commercially prepared bammy served in local restaurants but Miss Dell's bammy is special in taste and spirit.

When we leave with our two packages of bammy she tells me, "Now we are no longer strangers." So true, so true.