Island Cooking: The Fantasy & The Reality : Bull Johl and Island Dreaming: Cures for the Little-Girl Blues

Red-lipped mama

With your braids so high

Can you come with me

See hummingbirds fly?

Can you eat some bull johl

And cold farine

Eat a little zaboca

And dream a little dream?

The other day life hung heavy on me.

I found myself marching to work with tears welling up in my eyes. Then I remembered Mama.

When I was a child, Mama could reach deep into her bag of island tricks for a remedy for little girl blues and produce her own version of smelling salts: dried codfish. In Spanish we call it bacalao. In small-island talk we call it saltfish.

Sometimes we had to talk small-island talk because Mama was from St. Vincent, a windward island that is one of the smallest in the Caribbean chain. She met and married my father in Trinidad, the southernmost island in the chain and they migrated to New York to earn more money.

By the time she arrived in Detroit, Ellen Hernandez still had sun, sea and the Trinidad hummingbird stubbornly in her veins. The stubbornness, hummingbirds, sun and sea she transferred easily to me, a native Detroiter.

The vehicle was bacalao.

After all bacalao was the food of early explorers (because when salted it lasted for long journeys).

However she prepared it, Mama’s bacalao went beyond basic nutrition. She was like a magician who could produce flakes of bacalao at crucial moments. We were poor, and codfish was and still is expensive for slim budgets. On Saturday mornings when Senor Garcia had island vegetables such as dasheen , tanya or yams in his store by Tiger Stadium, he would call and we would go shopping. On those Saturdays, we bought bacalao sin espina (without bones) and Mama would prepare bull johl (pronounced buljow) for breakfast the following Sunday morning.

Callaloo is the national dish of Trinidad, but as far as I’m concerned, bull johl is its national treasure. It consists of bacalao that has been de-salted, flaked and mixed with olive oil, onions, tomatoes and green pepper. It is the Trinidad version of tuna fish salad and typically is served with zaboca (small-island talk for avocado) and hops bread. Mama usually made bakes , another type of Trinidad bread (also called Johnny cake) to eat with our bull johl.

Each Sunday when we feasted on bull johl , I was convinced we had eaten all the bacalao . Then a week or so later a little bit of bull johl would appear again--maybe without zaboca but with bakes. Where did Mama get the fish from?

It wasn’t until I was almost grown that I realized she would hide unprepared portions of the fish somewhere in the refrigerator away from my insatiable codfish mouth. I began to glimpse the game. She would deceive me about how much bacalao she had in stock in order to feed me a little of the sea at a time-nourishing stuff to give my mind strength to travel and dream. Bacalao. Sometimes a woman needs a little dream.

Oh come float on salt

Let the sea make you light

Wide your eyes to the sun

With only blue in sight.

But there is reality, and Ellen Hernandez knew how to serve that up as well.

It was the gravy that told me for sure we were different. “Americans don’t know how to make gravy,” she told me. “They put flour in it. They don’t season. They don’t take care cooking their food.” It must have been difficult for her to be in a country where the women didn’t know how to make gravy. What could she talk to them about?

Mama tried her best to communicate and relate--without sacrificing her principles. She did this through me. “Would you like me to cook some American chicken for you?” Fried chicken, that is.

Our method of cooking chicken was to marinate it in vinegar and seasonings then stew it (pronounced schtew ) by melting some cooking oil, burning sugar in it (not getting it black) and dropping the chicken in the hot, burnt sugar and oil. The burnt sugar was the basis for the gravy.

When she fried chicken for me it was the chicken that had been prepared for stewing and had the smell of my mother on it. It never tasted like the Colonel’s-- but as a child I didn’t know that.

The fact that she cooked chicken at all was a marvel. Mama never ate chicken, nor any kind of fowl. She said that when she grew up on her father’s estate in St. Vincent, the sight of chickens being killed spoiled her appetite for them. I don’t know. Mama said many things. She was a storyteller. I know that she could make stew chicken like no other in the family. She took her time with it--washed the chicken, stood at the sink with her calves bent backward rubbing the seasoning into the chicken. You could tell her chicken. It was deep and rich and nuzzled into her grainy rice perfectly.

According to Mama, Americans never knew how to cook rice either. “They cook it sappy,” she said. Rice was a staple for us and each grain had to stand on its own. It had to cling onto the very fibers of the chicken. Only the right kind of gravy could unite the two.

There were so many different kinds of island foods eaten in the Hernandez household that I sometimes wondered if maybe Detroit was really Trinidad. Even when my father made spaghetti, it tasted spicy and Spanish like something residents of Arima, Trinidad, might have eaten for a Sunday feast.

The main elements of food that formed my womanhood, though, were the saltfish, burnt sugar gravy and grainy rice.

And the memory of the woman who danced with a towel while she prepared them as if she were parading around the Savannah in Trinidad during carnival.

But it’s another day and I’m parading down to work. This time, I’m smiling. My daughter asked me this particular morning, “Mom, could you buy me some codfish, for real?”

Red-lipped mama

With braids so high

Climb upon hummingbird

And fly.