The Dorian

In my travels, I pride myself on being an adventurous eater, “foodventurous” as I like to call it.  True, my will has been tested from time to time.  There are certain foods that I just don’t like: coconut, anise, olives, fermented millet porridge.  My feelings about chicken gizzards are well documented.  I was nearly undone when I foolishly let Dave order lunch for us in Westvleteren, Belgium and was forced, for the sake of pride, to eat what can only be described as chunky chicken Jell-O.  But nothing, my friends, not one thing could have prepared me for the unholy, gag-inducing terror of… 

The Dorian.

The Dorian is a fruit that, as far as my hosts or I know, grows exclusively on Zanzibar.  It has some similarities to Jackfruit, with its green spiky skin and large seeds, but though it is not anywhere near as large as the mighty Jackfruit, its skin is much spikier and its seeds are much larger.  Its rind is actually so spiky that it is impossible to hold the fruit by anything but the stem.  I feel that humanity should have gotten the hint that this was a fruit not intended for consumption.  The unblemished fruit gives off a vaguely sickening odor, yet another helpful hint for humanity to leave this fruit alone.  When you cut into it, the odor builds to a pungent scream of noxious fumes: DO NOT EAT THIS FRUIT!  The fruit’s flesh is amorphous white slimy pulp, clinging half-heartedly to seeds roughly the size of walnuts.  The overall effect reminded me of monkey’s brains, which are popular in Cantonese cuisine.

Was it intended to be a treat? A joke? A prank gone awry, played on me by the kindly sisters with whom I was staying?  I just don’t know, nor do I expect to.  I can say with all certainty that there was no malicious intent when they placed a plate of the reeking fruit in front of me.  I wish I could accurately describe the toxic smell.  The closest comparison I can come up with is a combination of sweat and gasoline.  I was cajoled into taking an infinitesimal taste by choruses of, “It’s sweet!  It smells bad, but the taste is sweet!”  They weren’t completely wrong- it tasted like sweat and gasoline with a hint of off-brand artificial sweetener.  Sr. Eunice told me it is good medicine for the stomach.  I can see the benefit if, say, someone took a goodly amount of poison and you didn’t have any activated charcoal around.  Personally, I don’t think I could hold a good dollop down. 

Eating cottage cheese was heaven compared to this heinous experience.

When I asked the sisters if they make all of their visitors try Dorian, then informed me that it is seasonal, so it isn’t available for visitors to try during most of the year.  When we parted ways, I assured them of my eventual return, promising to come in the Dorian’s off-season.

Epilogue

When I took the boat to Zanzibar on Monday, I thought it was cute and kind of funny that they handed out sick bags to all of the passengers for the 2 hour ride.  When I boarded the return shuttle, one quick sniff told me someone was taking a Dorian to the mainland.  I clutched my bag the entire way home and focused on breathing through my mouth.

Burying the Hatchet

Coconut and I have been at odds for as long as I can remember.  With the notable exception of coconut milk in Thai curry, I have loathed every food I have ever tried that has even the smallest traces of coconut.  “You can’t even taste it!” “It doesn’t even taste like coconut!”  Oh, how I detest those wheedling phrases, but I always relent.  I always give it a try.  Coconut shrimp, Caramel Delite/Samoa Girl Scout Cookies, Piña Coladas, Mounds candy, coconut rum… no, thank you.  Part of it is a texture thing- I can tell instantly if a cookie has coconut in it- and part of it is good old fashioned flavor.  I admit that I occasionally tell people that I am allergic in order to justify not eating proffered coconut treats. (Remember that episode of Wishbone when Sam had that awful reaction to the granola bar with coconut in it?  I was crazy jealous.)

So, naturally, when I was offered “coconut juice” on my first day in Zanzinbar, I politely but fervently declined.  “But Jo, it doesn’t even taste like coconut!”  *sigh*  So I relented to my sweetly insistent guides, and the driver pulled over to the side of the road.  He got out and came back a few minutes later with a large green coconut whose top had been whittled down and with a hole in the top.  He handed it to me and told me simply to drink.  When I looked inside, all I could see was clear liquid, and it didn’t smell anything like coconut, so I figured, what the hey?  I drank deeply from the awkwardly large seed, and it tasted magnificent!  Which is to say, NOTHING like coconut!  From my experience, I would say it tasted like very slightly sweetened water.  Had the coconut stayed on the tree for another 6 weeks or so, all of that water would have been absorbed making the hard coconut flesh that torments me so, but when it is still young enough, the “juice” is a delightfully refreshing treat. 

I feel that this is a big moment in my life, philosophically speaking.  If I can find a way, after all of these years, to enjoy raw coconut, then surely there must be a way to world peace!  But, you know, a way that doesn’t involve cutting down a growing thing in the flower of its youth to drink its life source.  That seems a little extreme in any other situation.

The Spice of Life

One of the things that I have always enjoyed about Africa is that they grow the kinds of things that America needs to have imported from faraway lands.  Bananas grow in the back yard.   Mango trees frequently dot the landscape.  Fresh, locally grown passion fruit and papayas are in fruit bowls on dining room tables.  I have eaten a lot of fruit, and I haven’t seen a single plu# sticker.

Zanzibar really kicked it up a notch. 

On my only full day on the island, my new friend Sr. Eunice and I started with a tour of a spice farm.  When you have been handling the red-capped McCormick spices almost exclusively your entire life, it is really mind-bending to see the spices in their raw, natural, living forms.  Our guide, Sisso, invited us to smell the alluringly sweet aroma of the ripening vanilla bean hanging from the vine.  He whittled a sliver of bark away from the cinnamon tree, bragging about the superior spicy quality of Zanzibar cinnamon, and handed it to me to chew. Better than all the Hot Tamales in the world!  Then, he used his knife to dig up a small bit of cinnamon tree root, and it amazingly smelled exactly like Vicks vapo-rub!  How could two such distinct flavors come from the same plant?  Cardamon, ginger, lemon grass, turmeric, cloves- each smelled more amazing than the last!  Sisso explained how the color of the pepper (white, green, or black), depended on when the peppercorn was harvested. We saw Henna, used for the elaborate painted skin decorations we saw on the arms of the Muslim women around town.  And the fruit!  We tried pickle fruit, shaped like a jalepeno, sour like a lime; star fruit, just shy of it’s true sweet ripeness, saw a young pineapple just starting to make it’s way in the world, and ate lichi by the dozens.  When lichi are ripe, they turn bright red, their spiky flesh making them about the size of a kiwi fruit.  Sisso would remove the rind so that I could eat the fruit, which looked and tasted for all the world like a peeled grape. 

A young man followed the tour at a distance, barefoot and wearing a trucker hat that read “Sex is not a crime.”  He hung back, weaving palm leaves together, and appearing magically at Sisso’s elbow whenever a tree needed to be climbed to retrieve out-of-reach fruit.  Towards the end of the tour, he twisted a rough looking rope around his feet, and scrambled straight up a towering palm tree to cut down a couple of coconuts.  There was something kind of aboriginal in the way that he climbed so easily, which made it all the more jarring when he answered his cell phone midway down the tree. Sisso led Sr. Eunice and I to a bench where we sat and sampled more local fruit- tangerines and custard apples (tasted exactly like apple Laffy Taffy- new favorite fruit!).   We capped off our taste adventure with samples of lemon grass and masala teas.  We dallied at the table of spices for sale for a while, but eventually had to tear ourselves away from the aromas and bid farewell to the spice farm.

Beauty

Zanzibar.  

To me, the word alone has always been synonymous with “exotic” and “mysterious” and “really really really far away.”  But to actually see it, to be there, to feel it under my feet and sense it with every fiber of my being… it seems less far, but by no means less exotic or mysterious.  Truly, Zanzibar exceeded my expectations in every possible way!

My first impression of Zanzibar from the boat, especially old Stonetown, the capital city, was that this is a place stuck in time.  From a distance, it is how I’ve always pictured Old San Juan or Havana (perhaps very inaccurately, since I’ve never seen either), with bright buildings lining the coast, blue water made bluer in contrast with the white sand beaches.  Within in minutes of disembarking from the Kilimanjaro II, my host, Sr. Claudia had greeted me like family and launched into a tour of Stonetown.  My first few hours took me to the House of Wonder, the former home of the Omani Sultan in Zanzibar, St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the oldest church in East Africa, and the Anglican Cathedral, which was built on the remains of the slave market after slave trade was illegalized.  We wound our way through labyrinthine streets as Sister told me about the culture and history of Zanzibar.  The population of Zanzibar is something like 98% Muslim, and you can see the Arab influence in almost everything, from architecture to cuisine to the people themselves (who, apparently are NOT called Zanzibarbarians;  Gonzo, you have led me astray).  All of it was beautiful to me.

One of the biggest surprises to me is that the entire island is made out of coral.  Yes, there is earth to grow things, and white sand beaches, but life on Zanzibar has been chiseled out of an ancient and massive hunk of coral.  Walking along a path at the compound where I was staying, Sr. Claudia warned me to watch my step, because what I had taken for rocks littering the path were actually hunks of coral poking up above the dirt. 

The ruins of palaces of sultans in ages past, the soaring palm trees dotting the landscape, the coral cliffs dropping down to white sand or azure water, the infinite number of stars arranged in unfamiliar constellations, the scars of the slave trade still born by the land- Zanzibar is a place of Beauty.  Some of it is happy and some of it is sad, but all of it is Beauty nonetheless.