At
Petite Pump Room, a waterfront restaurant in Charlotte
Amalie on the island of St Thomas, lunchtime usually finds locals and visitors
filling the tables and bar, taking in the island’s hills and watching seaplanes
take off and land in the harbor from nearby
St Croix.
اضافة اعلان
Since 1970, the Petite Pump Room has been a meeting place,
offering a menu of local favorites — stewed conch in butter sauce, fried local
snapper with a Creole sauce of tomato and bell peppers — alongside typical fare
like sandwiches and salads. But the restaurant’s fungi, a side dish made of hot
cornmeal that’s easy to overlook, is cherished by those from the islands but
remains unfamiliar to most visitors. “A lot of them will try it once you
explain it to them,” said Judy Watson, who owns the restaurant with her
husband, Michael Anthony Watson.
Fungi (pronounced foon-JEE), a cooked yellow cornmeal
mixture dotted with tender okra and thinned with chunks of butter, is a staple
on dinner tables and was once a fixture on restaurant menus across the Virgin
Islands.
But it is hard to find at newer restaurants, leaving
institutions like Petite Pump Room, De’ Coal Pot on the east side of the island
and Gladys’ Cafe in Charlotte Amalie to keep the dish alive on their menus.
Most native Virgin Islanders fondly remember fungi as a part
of their childhoods, and as a key element of fish and fungi, a common meal,
said Michael Watson, 59. “We ate it once a week or so growing up, and I’ve
always enjoyed it,” he said. “I used to beg my older sister to make it for me.”
But the recipe also represents an important piece of Virgin
Islands history. Fungi’s roots extend back to the 18th century when, under colonial
rule, food was rationed for enslaved Africans on the islands as part of a 1755
law that required slave owners to provide enslaved persons with corn flour or
cassava, as well as salt pork.
In his 1992 book, “Slave Society in the Danish West Indies,”
author and professor Neville A.T. Hall writes that this amount would have been
2 1/2 quarts of cassava or cornmeal per week, a small amount considering the
hard labor required during harvest season. To fill in the gaps, enslaved
Africans grew their own provisions on land hidden from slave owners. Okra, a
key ingredient in West African cooking brought to the Caribbean by the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, was likely added to the cornmeal around this time,
increasing the dish’s nutritional value, adding an earthy flavor and stretching
it into a meal that could feed many.
Preserving this part of Virgin Islands history is important
for Julius Jackson, the chef and manager at the cafe and bakery of My Brother’s
Workshop, a nonprofit organization that teaches managerial skills and culinary
arts in Charlotte Amalie. “When they make it, they usually say their
grandparents and the adults in their life eat fungi,” Jackson said of his
students.
The decline in the dish’s popularity isn’t unexpected, as it
requires more preparation than other staples like fried plantains or rice and
beans. The process of whipping, or “turning” it, is a time-consuming task that
prevents lumps and aerates the mixture.
But the appeal of fungi is that it uses few ingredients to
create a flavorful accompaniment to a stewed or fried protein.
In the cafe and in Jackson’s cookbook, “My Modern Caribbean
Kitchen,” his recipe for fungi is simplified: Cook the okra until tender before
whisking in a steady stream of cornmeal. The goal of his lessons at the cafe —
and this simplification — is to encourage a new generation of cooks to make
fungi at home.
He serves his fungi in a bowl of kallaloo, a hot soup made
with spinach, pork, and seafood, similar to the Nigerian dish efo riro. In
teaching younger cooks about recipes like fungi, he hopes to illustrate how
many Caribbean dishes are linked directly to West Africa. “There’s so much
history in our food that tells our story, and I can actually show them that,”
Jackson said.
As more restaurants specializing in global cuisines arrive
on the island, traditional dishes have become harder to come by. But that
doesn’t mean they should disappear completely, said Digby Stridiron, a chef who
grew up on St Croix. “If there’s a restaurant here that does traditional food, they
should serve fungi,” he said. “Just like you see jerk in Jamaica or roti in
Trinidad, because that’s what we eat here.”
Stridiron is in the process of opening a restaurant on St.
Thomas and believes that one way to preserve fungi may be to modernize it. For
his menu, he wants to source high-quality cornmeal from producers like Anson
Mills as well as dehydrated okra pods to enhance the flavor as they are cooked
with the cornmeal.
“The islands are a transitional place where people are
coming together and leaving their mark through food,” he said. “It’s always
evolving. As chefs, it’s our responsibility to keep dishes alive and innovate
them, while getting to the root of the dish and not losing sight of the flavor
and the concept.”
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