Free An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof Page A

this is unheard of in the Bahamas. He also tells me the missing crewman has been found. Herb, meanwhile—and after last night, who would dream of doubting him?—says
another
gale system is right behind the first.
    “We shouldn’t have left on a Friday,” I say to Belinda.
    “I shouldn’t have skipped church yesterday,” she says back to me.
    In fact, “the Christ child,” El Niño in Spanish, is responsible: El Niño, the warm-water current that gets its name because it arrives off the coast of South America around Christmas. Every few years, El Niño’s warming effect is stronger, lasts longer than usual, and has extensive meteorological effects well beyond the South American coast. Climatologists call these “El Niño years,” and in this part of the world, an El Niño year translates into more, and more intense, storms stirred up across the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Florida, and then hurled into the Bahamas. This is not just any El Niño year—it’s the strongest El Niño in a
hundred
years, ranked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as one of the major climatic events of the century. It is not an easy year to be a nervous first-timer on a sailboat in the Bahamas. The only consolation as we sit trapped at Chub Cay waiting for the second gale system to arrive is that the fishing boats laden with fresh stone crab claws and conch have been driven into harbor by the weather too.
     
    T
hwack, thwack, thwack, THWACK
. Belinda’s thirty-fourth birthday, and the dinner party is on her boat. It will be more of a surprise that way, Elizabeth and I, the cooks, had reasoned earlier in the day. If we invite Belinda and Todd to one of
our
boats for dinner—Elizabeth and Don are on
Adriatica
, which left Key Biscayne on Friday when we did—Belinda will figure it’s for her birthday. Much more fun if we don’t say anything and just show up on
Kairos
with food and drinks and take over her galley. Todd happily agrees.
    The only problem is, we’ve chosen conch as the main course, and it needs to be thoroughly tenderized or dinner will have the consistency of an inner tube. The weapon of choice is the conch hammer, the same sort of wooden or cast aluminum mallet used for tenderizing meat. So here we are, Elizabeth and I, beating the hell out of a dozen conch, spraying raw conchy bits all over Belinda’s galley, all over ourselves, and all over the ceiling of her boat. “Pound until it’s translucent, almost lacy,” says Steve, reading from the recipe Elizabeth found in one of her cruising books. “When you hold it up, light should show through it.”
Thwack, thwack, THWACK
. I beat the piece I’m working on a few more times for good measure, splurting a bit of conch juice onto Steve’s glasses and Belinda’s teak walls in the process. I’m so glad we decided to have the birthday dinner on her boat.
    The queen conch—pronounced
conk
to rhyme with
bonk
—is a cornerstone of Bahamian cuisine, and the islands bear the proof: mounds of empty conch shells, the mottled cream and tan exteriors and pearly pink interiors bleaching white in the sun. The shells can be up to a foot long, though most are no bigger than eight or nine inches. Each one has a small telltale hole chiseled between its short blunt spikes—where a knife was inserted to sever the tendon so the tasty inhabitant could be pulled out.
    Conch has been a popular food in the Bahamas as far back as the Arawaks, the islands’ original inhabitants. People on remote cays have long depended on “hurricane ham”: conch meat that’s been flattened, tenderized, and hung in the sun to dry until it takes on the color and texture of its namesake. Cured this way, conch will apparently last without refrigeration for a year, handy during bad weather, when boats carrying provisions can’t get to the islands and it’s too rough to take to the water to fish. The fresh meat is sweet and mild—somewhere between clam and calamari in its