The Secret Iguanas in my Kitchen
After long sea voyages to their Caribbean destinations, many of the early travelers to the Caribbean became food obsessed. The plump Dominican priest Jean-Baptiste Labat, who arrived in Martinique in 1693, frequently dined on what he acknowledged as indigenous food and drink, seemingly coming to appreciate the local island flavors and diligently recording their recipes. Among his reported culinary encounters, Labat described receiving a small iguana (a local lizard, about a foot and a half, not including the tail) as a gift. He saw to it that his kitchen applied European culinary skills to produce the meat en fricassee. Prepared like a chicken, Labat believed the iguana could fool the unsuspecting visitor to the island “[since] its flesh so resembles that of chicken thanks to its whiteness, its tenderness, its good flavor, and its delicacy.” Lady Maria Nugent, the wife of the Jamaican Governor, proved him right in 1804.
At the Nugent household and other plantation great houses, enslaved Africans and their descendants prepared the foods according to availability, custom, and cost. In this instance, Nugent managed to pass off a lizard by parading it as chicken fricassee. According to Lady Nugent’s journal,
”General N. played Colonel Irvine rather a naughty trick, by ordering an extraordinary fricassee for dinner, of which the Colonel ate twice, and highly commended it. It passed for chicken, but was really a guana [iguana]. When he hears, to-morrow, what it was, I expect to see wry faces, and a good laugh too.”
Lady Nugent’s remarks for the following day suggest that the dish had been well-received by all those that ate it and she notes that “indeed, it is considered not only a wholesome dish, but a great delicacy, by many Creoles.”
Lady Nugent’s and other colonial dining tables were filled with fresh fruits and cooked meats obtained from island Maroons, the enslaved African, who had escaped bondage and negotiated their freedom from the British. Their meats included jerked hogs prepared by Africans and their descendants, who seasoned the slow-cooked the meats and then smoked them underground. When the meat was obtained as much as a distance of a few days from settlements, Maroons cured it, by salting, drying or smoking. The hunted meat became valuable commodities. The seasoning became the stuff of legends and the local allspice, pepper, and salt were its transformative ingredients. Describing the Jamaica Maroons, the nineteenth-century naturalist Gosse also reported that they sold the hunted and jerked meat to city customers, who considered it a delicacy for the breakfast table.
Shhh… can you keep a secret? I’m whispering to you that this is a “curry chicken” recipe. It could be iguana, but nobody ever promised “an iguana in every pot.” Regardless, its successful presentation is all in the seasoning. I’m partial to homemade mixtures, but there’s nothing like Kanchan Jahan’s #1 All Purpose Special Madras Curry package from Trinidad. The meat-of-choice is marinating with a tablespoon of lime juice, vinegar, and a favorite curry paste or powder, while I sauté onion, celery, carrots, potatoes, fennel, marjoram, thyme, allspice, and pepper in a fry pan with a few drops of cooking oil, adding a few more spoonful’s of curry to the mixture towards the end. I flour, salt, and pepper, then brown the meat separately. After partially cooking the meat, I drain off the fat and combine the “chicken” with the vegetables in a saucepot, covering with broth. The pot needs to slowly simmer (fully cooking the vegetables and meat and thickening its gravy) for at least two hours to blend the flavors of four continents. In my imagination, an iguana watches over the proceedings perched on the tree outside the kitchen window.
