The consumption of bananas is enormous: more bananas are eaten than
vegetables; and more banana-trees are yearly being cultivated. The negro
seems to recognize instinctively that economical value of the banana to
which attention was long since called by Humboldt, who estimated that
while an acre planted in wheat would barely support three persons, an
acre planted in banana-trees would nourish fifty.
Bananas and plantains hold the first place among fruits in popular
esteem;--they are cooked in every way, and served with almost every sort
of meat or fish. What we call bananas in the United States, however, are
not called bananas in Martinique, but figs (_figues_). Plantains seem
to be called _bananes_. One is often surprised at popular nomenclature:
_choux_ may mean either a sort of root (_choux-caraïbe_), or the top
of the cabbage-palm; _Jacquot_ may mean a fish; _cabane_ never means
a cabin, but a bed; _crickett_ means not a cricket, but a frog; and at
least fifty other words have equally deceptive uses. If one desires
to speak of real figs--dried figs--he must say _figues-Fouanc_ (French
figs); otherwise nobody will understand him. There are many kinds
of bananas here called _figues_,--the four most popular are the
_figues-bananes_, which are plantains, I think; the _figues-makouenga_,
which grow wild, and have a red skin; the _figues-pommes_
(apple-bananas), which are large and yellow; and the _ti-figues-desse_
(little-dessert-bananas), which are to be seen on all tables in St.
Pierre. They are small, sweet, and always agreeable, even when one has
no appetite for other fruits.
It requires some little time to become accustomed to many tropical
fruits, or at least to find patience as well as inclination to eat them.
A large number, in spite of delicious flavor, are provokingly stony:
such as the ripe guavas, the cherries, the barbadines; even the
corrossole and _pomme-cannelle_ are little more than huge masses of
very hard seeds buried in pulp of exquisite taste. The _sapota_, or
_sapodtilla_, is less characterized by stoniness, and one soon learns to
like it. It has large flat seeds, which can be split into two with the
finger-nail; and a fine white skin lies between these two halves. It
requires some skill to remove entire this little skin, or pellicle,
without breaking it: to do so is said to be a test of affection. Perhaps
this bit of folk-lore was suggested by the shape of the pellicle, which
is that of a heart. The pretty fille-de-couleur asks her doudoux:--"_Ess
ou ainmein moin?--pouloss tiré ti lapeau-là sans cassé-y_." Woe to
him if he breaks it!... The most disagreeable fruit is, I think, the
_pomme-d'Haiti_, or Haytian apple: it is very attractive exteriorly;
but has a strong musky odor and taste which nauseates. Few white creoles
ever eat it.
Of the oranges, nothing except praise can be said; but there are
fruits that look like oranges, and are not oranges, that are far more
noteworthy. There is the _chadèque_, which grows here to fully three
feet in circumference, and has a sweet pink pulp; and there is the
"forbidden-fruit" (_fouitt-défendu_), a sort of cross between the orange
and the chadèque, and superior to both. The colored people declare that
this monster fruit is the same which grew in Eden upon the fatal tree:
_c'est ça mênm qui fai moune ka fai yche conm ça atouelement!_ The
fouitt-défendu is wonderful, indeed, in its way; but the fruit which
most surprised me on my first acquaintance with it was the _zabricôt_.
--"_Ou lè yon zabricôt?_" (Would you like an apricot?) Cyrillia asked
me one day. I replied that I liked apricots very much,--wanted more than
one. Cyrillia looked astonished, but said nothing until she
returned from market, and put on the table _two_ apricots, with the
observation:--"_Ça ke fai ou malade mangé toutt ça!_" (You will get sick
if you eat all that.) I could not eat even half of one of them. Imagine
a plum larger than the largest turnip, with a skin like a russet apple,
solid sweet flesh of a carrot-red color, and a nut in the middle bigger
than a duck's egg and hard as a rock. These fruits are aromatic as well
as sweet to the taste: the price varies from one to four cents each,
according to size. The tree is indigenous to the West Indies; the
aborigines of Hayti had a strange belief regarding it. They alleged that
its fruits formed the nourishment of the dead; and however pressed by
hunger, an Indian in the woods would rather remain without food than
strip one of these trees, lest he should deprive the ghosts of their
sustenance.... No trace of this belief seems to exist among the colored
people of Martinique.
Among the poor such fruits are luxuries: they eat more mangoes than
any other fruits excepting bananas. It is rather slobbery work eating
a common mango, in which every particle of pulp is threaded fast to
the kernel: one prefers to gnaw it when alone. But there are cultivated
mangoes with finer and thicker flesh which can be sliced off, so that
the greater part of the fruit may be eaten without smearing and sucking.
Among grafted varieties the _mangue_ is quite as delicious as the
orange. Perhaps there are nearly as many varieties of mangoes in
Martinique as there are varieties of peaches with us: I am acquainted,
however, with only a few,--such as the _mango-Bassignac_;--_mango-pêche_
(or peach-mango);--_mango-vert_ (green mango), very large and
oblong;--_mango-grêffé_;--_mangotine_, quite round and
small;--_mango-quinette_, very small also, almost egg-shaped;--_mango-Zézé_,
very sweet, rather small, and of flattened form;--_mango-d'or_ (golden
mango), worth half a franc each;--_mango-Lamentin_, a highly cultivated
variety--and the superb _Reine-Amélie_ (or Queen Amelia), a great yellow
fruit which retails even in Martinique at five cents apiece.